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The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren on Mutually Crafted Happiness: How MCH2022 Happened.Hackaday Podcast 179: Danger Chess, Corona Motors, An Omni-Walker, And A Fast Talking Telescope 2 Comments Posted in Fail of the Week, Peripherals Hacks Tagged broken cable, fix broken magsafe, magsafe, power cable, soldering Post navigation What approaches have you used to fix cables broken where they meet the plug housing, and how do you improve the situation for the future? So, brethren and sistren, lay on with brickbats and tell what I did wrong. Clean as this is, it’s just waiting to happen the same way again.
Certainly, the iFixit route shown here comes out much cleaner by sliding off the housing, clipping the damaged wire, and beginning anew. And yet, I was left with the distinct feeling the solution could have been, I don’t know, cleaner. The computer charged up as happy as you’d like. The business end of the plug has a big silver ground surrounding small gold positive leads, and touching the ground with the wire should work just fine, right? The solid wire was still securely soldered to the ground, so instead of trying to attach it to the cable side of the plug, I could connect it to the computer side, by shoving it into the socket alongside the plug. However, that sounded like a lot of work. One option was to wait until the goop had cooled and burnish it clean with a Dremel, then attempt to re-solder using an appropriate tip. What now? We were left with not being able to use the cable at all.
iFixit cracked it open and started from scratch. Worse, I had accidentally burned through the insulation protecting the lead wire, and had to cover it in electrical tape. The WLC100’s default tip is a big fat wedge and it was too big to put next to the plug, and the conductive ring quickly got covered in melted plastic and I couldn’t solder anything to it. I should have grabbed my own iron, a WES51, or at least swapped in its ninja-sharp tip.
My daughter was using the WLC100’s default tip. This is, by the way, the part where I took over so you can blame me and not my kid. My idea was to solder the other end of the 22-gauge wire to the metal ring. The way the ground connects to the plug is by passing through a conductive ring. Grabbing for the iron, we tinned the ground and soldered a length of 22-gauge solid wire to it. We pulled the wire away from the insulated lead wire and twisted it into a single stranded wire parallel to the lead wire. We began by using an Xacto to cut away enough insulation to expose about half an inch of the stranded wire. She started off working while I supervised, then I took over later on. We busted out her WLC100 and sat down to get our solder on. I didn’t have the money to buy her a new one, and I figured we could repair the break. So it was with my daughter’s Macbook cable. The problem with this configuration is that the stranded ground also gets flexed until it breaks, one strand at a time, until the cable stops working. This type of cable consists of an insulated lead wire surrounded by a stranded ground wire. Sooner or later the insulation around the plug housing, where it plugs into the laptop, cracks and the strands of wire can be seen. Macbook chargers really aren’t meant to flex around a lot, and if you’re the kind of person who uses the laptop on, well, the lap, with the charger in, it’s gonna flex. My thirteen-year-old daughter asked for help repairing her Macbook charging cable. This is really a case of an ill-advised ground. So I made an awful, kludgey, “there I fixed it” level repair, and I need to come clean.