Can I repair a flex ribbon cable?

Is there a way to basically bond or splice two ribbon cables together? I have an expensive mouse and it was dropped. The cable was severed, and I want to know if I can repair it, because it's sort of oddly shaped and isn't just a straight cable like the kind I could buy from Digi-Key or something?

It is attached to the ball control circuit thing of an iMac mouse. It can't just be replaced because it's built into a tiny flexible circuit. It is the kapton type.

Comments

[kelseymh]

Pictures?  Is it regular ribbon cable -- multiconductor, light blue?  Or is it a kapton/trace hybrid?  With the former you could use a cable header and just crimp two cut ends together.  Hybrids are really tricky to "repair" -- it's more reliable to replace it.

[frollard]

Seconded.  Worst case scenario you could reverse engineer the connections and jumper (solder) fine wire between the connected elements - not ideal I know.

[MdP1632]

It is a kapton cable.

[kelseymh]

Oh.  Sorry to hear that.  The few times we had bad hybrids on the BaBar silicon vertex tracker, they just removed and replaced them.  It sounds like you aren't in position to have a bunch of spares around.

We do have some serious hardware gurus on site.  Hopefully one of them will have experience with these sorts of repairs.