Well it SOUNDED easy! - Nightmares Soldering
Ok, the concept sounds simple. Solder four little wires to the bottom of my motherboard. Heat motherboard, heat solder, wallah, its attached! Did I mention four LITTLE wires, with four VERY LITTLE points of contact, that are dangerously close to other little circuits that I don’t want to touch :-). Okay, maybe its been a little while since my radio shack days and this isn’t as easy as expected. Imagine that, one of my projects has become more difficult than originally anticipated :-), just don’t ask my wife about the “surprise” vinyl removal project 
When I originally found out that I would need to solder an extra molex connector to my motherboard to help avoid the amp problem inherent in the Tiger MP’s design, I thought it was no big deal. Back in the day, I was a Radio Shack kid. While other kids where busy tying fireworks to the tails of cats, I was playing with circuitry with my cousin (and blowing up frogs, but that’s another story).
Soldering really small transistors, resistors, onto very small circuit boards was just another fun summer day. We had all sorts of hair brained ideas, like “shock tennis balls”, that delivered upwards of 100v on contact (low amps of course), and “spy” equipment that would make James Bond jealous. We made just about any crazy vehicle you can create out of Legos, toothpicks, and circuitry that you can imagine :-). (I’ll tell you, kids these days just have no imagination!) Soldering really small objects was part of all of it.
Why I can’t seem to these four freaking wires to connect to my motherboard, I can’t tell you! I’ve probably spent a good 4-5 hrs soldering iron in hand, with my 150w bulb in the 60w rated lamp focused on four square inches of my motherboard, intensely trying to get the solder to take to the board AND the wire at the same time without connecting to the other circuitry on the board. I got one wire to stick once, only to have it disconnected as I tried to make it more perfect. Its enough to drive a man insane!
Truth be told, I’m sort of the techie that does not do well with really small things. I hate those really small screws for the PCI slots in many of today’s cases. When I used to install cable, and would encounter one of these cases, it would not be uncommon for me to drop those little screws 3, 4, 10 times before I finally got it to stick in place. Let me tell you, it instills true confidence in your abilities when you sit there for 10 minutes trying to get a screw in place, meanwhile the customer is sitting over your shoulder watching you drop the screw time and time again (occasionally loosing the screw somewhere in the vastness of the case, only to be left shaking the case back and forth like you’re panning for gold, to no avail. It seems always having to resort to completely turning the case upside down, having the screw fall out, and scurrying across the room taking a place under the most immovable object in the room).
Anyway, that being said. My computer still is not built. While I have managed to avoid those annoying screws by my cool Super Lanboy case, I am stuck with this silly soldering project. Should I not make more progress in my next computer building session, I will need to call in a professional
My buddy Andrew is an Uber techie, hardware being his specialty. While to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never known him to solder anything, I willing to bet he could finish this project in under 15 minutes. The precision and accuracy I’ve seen him able to accomplish in the most difficult situations leads me to believe this would be his cup of tea. I once saw him put a wall box into plaster inbetween a desk, and an armoire with less than 6″ of clearance in any direction, without a level, and operating on less than 6 hrs sleep. The final outcome was PERFECTLY level, and exactly the size of the box. For any of you that have ever tried to put a wall box into plaster with tons of clearance, you know how difficult this is.
Anyway, I’ll let you know how this goes.
September 20th, 2006 at 7:50 am
You’re a much better man than I. I try to keep the soldering gun as far away as possible. Then again, I work somewhere with people that like to do that kind of thing.