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Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

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Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#341
post #295
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in my living room? A few months ago I disassembled and cleaned a grape juice damaged MBP. Tried it afterward and no dice. Tried it yesterday on a bored whim and I now have a working MBP with a sticky keyboard. Why? I have no idea.

Heh. I caught in the rain with my MacBook Air, and it worked fine for a day, but then wouldn't boot up at all and wouldn't hold charge. Three weeks later and rice and all that jazz and nothing. A couple months later, the charger showed a light, but it wouldn't boot and never lit up green. Six months from the first incident, and I randomly plugged it in and it booted instantly - I was ecstatic. It lasted two weeks bef…

Again, this was likely due to the minerals in the water causing a short, and after a long period of time, the mineral "bridges" broke/wore-away, resolving the short, and allowing your macbook to boot.

Regarding the "Apple Geniuses", I doubt there would of been anything they could do for you, other than sit there with a cuetip and attempt to wipe down your entire mainboard after a full disassembly. Not to mention water damage probably isn't covered...

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#342
post #295
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in my living room? A few months ago I disassembled and cleaned a grape juice damaged MBP. Tried it afterward and no dice. Tried it yesterday on a bored whim and I now have a working MBP with a sticky keyboard. Why? I have no idea.

Heh. I caught in the rain with my MacBook Air, and it worked fine for a day, but then wouldn't boot up at all and wouldn't hold charge. Three weeks later and rice and all that jazz and nothing. A couple months later, the charger showed a light, but it wouldn't boot and never lit up green. Six months from the first incident, and I randomly plugged it in and it booted instantly - I was ecstatic. It lasted two weeks bef…

One weird trick I remember from alt.hackers was using WD-40 to remove the water from soaked electronics, and then using high-purity isopropyl(?) alcohol to clean off the WD-40. (You'd want to remove the WD-40 since it would attract dust.)

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The link you attached lists a few different lead-free solder alloys with the lowest melting at 412F(211C) well above 340F(171C). Eutectic tin/lead solder has a melting point of 361F(183C), also above 340F. I'm not sure whether or not cracks can heal at temperatures below the melting point, but I would be surprised if that were possible.

So it turns out that home oven manufacturers don't care too much about precision when it comes to oven temperature (and it doesn't matter usually). A high end home oven will easily swing between +- 25 degrees of the temperature that you have dialed in, and that's if it's well calibrated. If he didn't dial in "340" quite right, and his oven was average, I can easily see it hitting temperatures of 412+, and that could…

Not to mention we don't need the solder to completely melt, only soften (depending how badly cracked the joint(s) were).

If this were Mythbusters, we'd call it "Plausible".

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#344
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. I caught in the rain with my MacBook Air, and it worked fine for a day, but then wouldn't boot up at all and wouldn't hold charge. Three weeks later and rice and all that jazz and nothing. A couple months later, the charger showed a light, but it wouldn't boot and never lit up green. Six months from the first incident, and I randomly plugged it in and it booted instantly - I was ecstatic. It lasted two weeks bef…

One weird trick I remember from alt.hackers was using WD-40 to remove the water from soaked electronics, and then using high-purity isopropyl(?) alcohol to clean off the WD-40. (You'd want to remove the WD-40 since it would attract dust.)

That's interesting, I'd think you'd just use rubbing alcohol (isopropyl) of >95%, since it will evaporate very rapidly by itself, taking any moisture with it. It also has great cleaning properties by itself (often used to eat the thermal paste gunk off heatsinks). Isopropyl alcohol is what "Swimmers Ear Drops" are mostly made of (for when you get water stuck in your ear).

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#345
post #341
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. I caught in the rain with my MacBook Air, and it worked fine for a day, but then wouldn't boot up at all and wouldn't hold charge. Three weeks later and rice and all that jazz and nothing. A couple months later, the charger showed a light, but it wouldn't boot and never lit up green. Six months from the first incident, and I randomly plugged it in and it booted instantly - I was ecstatic. It lasted two weeks bef…

Again, this was likely due to the minerals in the water causing a short, and after a long period of time, the mineral "bridges" broke/wore-away, resolving the short, and allowing your macbook to boot. Regarding the "Apple Geniuses", I doubt there would of been anything they could do for you, other than sit there with a cuetip and attempt to wipe down your entire mainboard after a full disassembly. Not to mention wate…

That sounds plausible, though I thought any power running through it would've caused it to burn out. I was actually going to do a full disassembly with a mate of mine who was an EE, but never got round to it. We attempted to do it with my iPhone (which was dunked into a toilet in an unrelated incident), but even cleaning everything with isopropyl alcohol it wouldn't work. I didn't hold high hopes for the MacBook.

And no, water damage wasn't covered by warranty, but it was out of warranty anyhow. I just didn't want to pay another $2K for a MacBook Air (maxed out specs at the time).

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#346
I apologize in advance for having to be harsh in my commentary.

As someone with over 30 years in electronics manufacturing the first thought I had when reading this article was: This is an incredibly stupid idea.

Do not try to play manufacturing engineer with your kitchen oven. You will, without a doubt, cause more harm than good. Not to mention coating the oven where you cook your food with stuff you don't want in your food.

Modern high density RoHS electronics boards require higher temperatures in precisely timed and controlled vapor phase reflow ovens. Components, solder joints and the board itself will almost certainly suffer damage from uncontrolled non-vapor profiles in a kitchen oven.

It is far more likely that components will be exposed to far greater temperatures than rated as well as all kinds of imaginable differential heating and thermal slew rates. You can destroy the vias and pads connecting multiple layers of a multi-layer PCB simply by having differential heating or high temperatures. You can also damage dielectrics in precise impedance controlled boards. You can cause problems with solder that might very much affect signal integrity in high speed signals (for example, around the memory subsystem).

In general terms, you are very much opening Pandora's Box if you think you can use a kitchen oven to reflow a modern mid to high complexity circuit board.

Beyond that, you don't have the necessary optical, x-ray and high-speed testing equipment required to verify operation. You don't even have access to design data needed to understand where critical paths might lie.

Sorry. This is a really dumb idea.

Then we move on to drilling holes for the fans. OK, great, yes, more cool air molecules per unit time is what cooling is about. However, this design does not have any air filtration mechanisms. So, by drilling a bunch of holes you are far more likely to create a situation where you will coat the entire inside of the computer with a layer of dust and dirt with the potential to cause major issues.

If I had no choice but to cut holes on the bottom on one of these machines I'd take the time to engineer a bolt-on filter plate with washable filters so that the internals might be protected from contamination (within reason).

A far better idea might be (more on that later) to engineer the attachment of a surface extension feature on the bottom of the machine rather than drilling ventilation holes. "Surface extension" is what you commonly see on heatsinks, in other words, fins. Anyone who's done thermal FEA quickly understands that designing thermal management by eye only works if you have a lot of experience. These machines probably have decent thermal design. Perhaps all that is needed to make them a bit better is to add 10 mm of metal to the bottom with a nice thick set of fins widely spaced in order to extend the surface and promote thermal exchange with ambient air.

Final point on TIM's (Thermal Interface Materials) like thermal paste. Their main purpose in life is to take two non-perfect surfaces and bridge the little imperfections so that more molecules make a thermal connection between surface A and surface B. If you could polish both surfaces to absolute perfection and mate them to absolute perfection you would not need TIM's. When it comes to thermal paste, you want as little as possible and you do not want any air gaps. To some degree there's an art to applying these kinds of TIMs.

The author talked about buying some copper sheet in an attempt to fix the problem. Again, horrible idea. You have have two layers of TIM, on one each side of the copper sheet.

In the hands of those without the requisite knowledge or experience I feel that ceramic sheet-based TIMs are far safer (http://goo.gl/Q6e0Es).

But I digress. The best idea would have been to walk the machine to Apple and deal with it through their channel. That's what they do best.

The good news is that this kitchen-reflow machine is unlikely to make it to the used market due to the drilling on the bottom. I would hope that the author will be honest enough to disclose the amateur reflowing of the main board if and when the machine is ever sold in the used market.

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#347
post #254

Just a note to anyone here who may be having this problem: I had an early 2011 MBP, the GPU died three times in three months. Apple charged me $300 to fix it the first time, did it for free the second time because it was still under repair warranty, and then replaced the machine entirely with a brand new 15" MBPr the third time. Obviously, the fact that it failed three times in as many months is unacceptable (and pro…

I was sitting in an Apple store getting the battery replaced on my MacBook Air. It only lasted 300 cycles instead of the 1,000 it is supposed to. My battery replacement was free despite being outside the 1 year warranty. Next to me a woman had brought in her laptop because of problems (did not overhear what), and they replaced it for free despite it being 3 years old. I definitely agree that the first step with Apple…

Guess Apple isn't as good down under. Terrible support from Apple in Singapore and Australia, from my personal experience.

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't buy insurance for things that won't ruin you. The insurer will calculate the risk of whatever happening, and obviously charge more than likelihood * cost. So unless your risk is higher than average, you're losing money. And keep in mind that the average insurance taker probably has higher risk than the overall population.

Except healthcare! You're required to buy it in the US now, but regardless...the hospitals would negotiate with insurance companies to 90% reduction)- you can't do that as an individual and will generally be stuck with the full price.

Health cost can very easily ruin you, even if you are quite well off. Even the possibly better prices negotiated by insurances for a serious illness are ruinous, and keep in mind you most likely won't have an income while you're seriously ill. Reduced cost in the US is just icing on top.

So everyone definitely needs insurance for healthcare.

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#349
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop.

Are you pg?

The reason I asked is because parent user About says "I use this account for things I can't say: http://paulgraham.com/say.html".

His previous posts do not confirm the identity, but it does correlate with Paul Graham.

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#350
post #31
post #21

Is it normal in the US to use Celsius for computer inside temperatures, and Fahrenheit for the oven? Aren't you converting back and forth the whole time?

Yes, pretty normal. For temperatures near 100C the conversion is easy. Ovens report temperatures in F, computers in C, shrug. In general you use F for human temperatures (air temperature, fever, and cooking), and C for everything else. F has a better range for air and body temperature anyway. Maybe Europeans will switch to F, and Americans will switch to Km :) (In case you wonder why F is better: The coldest temperat…

Unlikely. Celsius degrees provide quite practical numbers that are easy to relate to: 0 = freezing, 20 = room temperature, 16-25 = range of pleasant but not too hot outside temperatures (tastes will vary), 37 = body temperature, >40 = too hot, 100 = boiling water. Although my room thermostat allows itself to be set to half-degrees, not all thermostats do, and you don't really need those in practice. On the other hand, I see Fahrenheit numbers often being used like 60s, 70s or 80s, which seems to indicate that Fahrenheit has a bit too much detail.

It is really a matter of what you are used to.

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