Introduction: NI Maschine - Repair PCB Track After Dodgey USB Port Replacement

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If during the replacement of the USB port you accidently damage or ‘peel up’ one or more of the traces, these can easily be fixed with the right tools and some careful handy work! I would highly recommend you have all of the below list of equipment as I had several failed attempts at this and it wasnt till I finally had all the right gear that I got mine to work! The Maschine costs AU$500+ to replace so buying all the below equipment is well worth it in my opinion plus you will learn some good skills from this project and probably want to do more soldering work in the future so good to have the stuff handy J

Step 1: What You Need....

• Soldering Iron with fine tip
• Solder
• Soldering Station with alligator clips and magnifying glass
• Wire (any guage as you will be extracting single strands of copper from inside the wire to match the trace size that you are patching)
• Sand Paper (medium grit)
• Tweezers
• Isopropyl alcohol ($12 from the hardware store. Jaycar will have this too..)
• Sharp knife (Craft knife or Stanley knife will do)

Step 2: Method

1. Clean the area with isopropyl alcohol and use the magnifying glass in your solder station to identify which of the 4 main traces that run from the USB ports 4 terminals to various chips on the Mainboard if damaged. It could be more than one of them. There is 3 traces on the top and 1 on the bottom of the board.

**See Image of my damaged PCB tracks **   

2. Cut out the damaged section of trace using the sharp knife.
3. Cut a very small rectangle of sand paper and fold in half so you have a very small surface of sand paper. Using the magnifying glass to see what your doing, sand the green coating off the track to expose some clean copper to solder onto.
4. Strip a wire exposing the required length of copper wire and separate 2 of the strands. Twist them together and melt some solder up and down the length of them to seal them as one wire. Thanks to this guy for that tip!
5. Put a tiny blob of solder on the exposed section of track and hold the heat on it temporarily until the solder bonds nicely with the track. Remove excess solder.
6. You can now solder to patch wire in place. I had to do this with 3 of the 4 traces and managed to finally get it working solidly! See how dodgy mine looks but it works well! This was my first attempt so was trial and error (and a lot of Googling) but it worked a treat!