Way back in May of 2010, I finally graduated college. I received a Bachelors of Business Administration in Management Information Systems. Ever since that time though, I have been trying to find the right job for myself so that I can live my life the way that I want to. This has granted me a significant amount of free time to search for jobs and do other things that I have been meaning to do. Make no mistake, while I have plenty of free time, I am sometimes not able to do what I want do due to the absence of a full time and stable position. Make no mistake, I’ve done a lot of work for myself through Erlick Computer help and managed my finances, but I realize that this is unsustainable at best. But seeing as I’ll now launch into a tirade about various ideas that I have, I will digress.
One of the things that I’ve been meaning to do was to fix my computer speakers. I realized that whenever I wiggled the speaker connector it would cut in and out. So I recently fixed them and did something that I haven’t done in well over 11 years: Soldering. Way back when I was younger, I went to science camp and one of the things you could do was to learn electronics. That involved learning electronic principles and theory, the various components, and finally how to solder together components on a board to make various electronic devices that they had designs for. I was quite good at it and managed to make an electronic roulette wheel, which was by far the hardest project that they had. We had to draw our own traces on the board, etch them, assemble and solder the components together and then hopefully we’d have a working device. This wheel was notoriously hard because there were four IC chips that had to be installed, with one having upwards of 20 joints to solder. Naturally we didn’t solder the chips in directly; we used chip holders and then inserted the IC’s later. Needless to say, mine worked perfectly on the first try.
I did have a soldering iron around, but I needed some solder and a replacement 1/8th” headphone plug, which I got at Radio Shack. All I can say is thank god that Radio Shack still has those parts bins, soldering equipment and other electronic equipment. The only equivalent that I know of is computer parts stores like Micro Center, as CompUSA has been gone for many years, as well as Circuit City. I miss them both, but anyway. I did discover that the tip of the iron was more or less done for, but I made do with what I had and managed to solder it together properly and got it to work. It’s not pretty and I need to re-solder the ground wire but it works for right now, which is more than I can say for when it was broken as I wasn’t even getting a signal to the speakers. Anyway, I am quite sure that once I get a replacement tip, I’ll get it into shape and seal it in epoxy. Once that’s done, my Washburn CS-780 is up next, as I need to rewire the heck out of it. I’ll bet I could reclaim some of my lost soldering talent as well. Maybe it’s always been with me, waiting for me to use it.
Bah, I hate free time…
Update: Well it’s all fixed and I dare say it sounds better than before. Actually it should, because it was a machine soldered aluminum plug, whereas now it’s a gold plated, hand-soldered plug. It’s the reason why hand built engines are better than assembly line built. I’ll leave the guitar for another day though.
Either that or I’m trying to compensate for a hack solder job. It works, okay. It’s my first solder job in 10 years, give me a break…