Equipment with blown fuses, charred resistors, fried semiconductors, and vaporized circuit traces are on the workbenches of repair shops everywhere. Such obvious damage can be easily — perhaps too ...

I have a Cadence Z800 car audio amplifier that has a cracked PCB. I got into an accident last winter and when I was hit, it caused the body of the amplifier to shift to the side about an inch, ...

When [Taylor Burley] first opened up the cartridge for The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons, it certainly didn’t look like it had been dunked in corrosive orange juice. But looks can be deceiving, ...

In Figure 1, cut the PCB (printed-circuit-board) trace at its left end, disconnecting it from resistor R 0. Measure impedance Z 1, the impedance looking from your cut to the left back toward the ...

A while ago, [drygol] was asked to repair a few old Amiga keyboards. The key switches worked fine, but in the past decade or two, the flexible PCB ribbon connector has been mistreated, and was in an ...

This article was taken from the November 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by ...