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How I resurrected my MacBook Pro by putting it in the oven

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Re: How I resurrected my MacBook Pro by putting it in the oven

#11

Post by watson »

For anyone interested in the nerdy details of why this works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflow_soldering

Anyway, this isn't new - I remember seeing this on Slashdot, HN and a lot ofter other places over the years:

http://voices.yahoo.com/how-reflow-laptop-motherboard-oven-6...

http://mr-mediocre.hubpages.com/hub/How-Baking-A-Motherboard...

etc...

Re: How I resurrected my MacBook Pro by putting it in the oven

#12

Post by DanBC »

steeve wrote: post #6

Or you can use a hot air gun if you have one. Reflowing does work wonders.

Be careful not to use vigorous airspeed. It's possible to blow balls of solder away from the pads. These then cause shorts and are annoying to fault find and repair.

Re: How I resurrected my MacBook Pro by putting it in the oven

#13

Post by Munksgaard »

I've done this twice on different laptops. It works like a charm :)

The explanation I got when I did it the first time was this: When the computer heats up and gets cold a lot, over time the solder joints on the motherboard might "crack", or something, effectively giving loose conncetions. By heating the joints in this controlled manner, the metal melts and solidifies properly when cooled down.

Re: How I resurrected my MacBook Pro by putting it in the oven

#14

Post by stinos »

jonmrodriguez wrote: post #3

How does this work? Is the idea that there's a loose chip, and you're reflowing the solder to re-attach it? Relatedly, one of my friends successfully revived a bricked playstation by heating up the motherboard with a heat gun.

Not sure if it is real reflow, doesn't seem warm enough. Maybe some contact point was not optimal, and by heating everything and the expansion resulting from it there was some repositioning causing the contact to work properly again. I'm assuming this because we had a similar, but inverse situation once. There was a small soldering problem that would only manifest after the PCBs got heated >50C.

But in the end it all comes down to luck, it's not like 'heat it' is the new tool that will fix all. (My MBP had a swollen battery, wouldn't dare putting that thing in an oven)

Re: How I resurrected my MacBook Pro by putting it in the oven

#15

Post by DanBC »

[deleted] wrote: post #4

[deleted]

Short circuits are sometimes fixed by melting the solder.

Surface tension tends to keep devices attached to the printed circuit board and the solder on the pads.

It's not something I would try except as a measure of last resort.

Re: How I resurrected my MacBook Pro by putting it in the oven

#16

Post by ics »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #5
jonmrodriguez wrote: post #3

How does this work? Is the idea that there's a loose chip, and you're reflowing the solder to re-attach it? Relatedly, one of my friends successfully revived a bricked playstation by heating up the motherboard with a heat gun.

As far as I know, 170C is not quite hot enough to melt solder. It would need to be around 200C.

Depends on the alloy, tin/bismuth will melt around 140C. I would've expected over 180C to be necessary as well though. Sn63Pb37 is very common and melts at 180C, but since it has lead I don't think it's used much in large scale electronics manufacture.

Re: How I resurrected my MacBook Pro by putting it in the oven

#19

Post by stinos »

nichodges wrote: post #9

Reminds me of my first Raspberry Pi. It was from the first batch, and only worked if I gave it a blast with a hairdryer. Once it warmed up it booted fine, but if I turned off the hairdryer it would turn off after about 30 seconds. At the time it was about a month wait for a new one to arrive, so I did a lot of initial Pi discovery with a hairdryer.

Tried it on mine, no luck. Basically it didn't run properly because the resistance of the fuse was ridiculously high resulting in a voltage drop of almost 1V. Meaning I had to power it with a 6.5V power supply. Well, you don't find those easily so I just got rid of the fuse.
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