Everyone and their mom, including people who have never touched a soldering iron in their life will tell you how important recapping our retro machines is. I have been amateur soldering since 2005, and now own a decent quality Weller soldering station and Aoyue desoldering station, however, due to a lack of patience, neatness and steady hands, I'm never going to be great at soldering. That's why my wife has learned to help me with desoldering and the finer detailed stuff.
Anyway, getting to the point, recapping looks simple enough for most equipment -- just tedious. That, however, has not been my experience. I just starting recapping my later revision PGM (the one without the coin cell) and only managed 4 of 13 caps. Despite having the desoldering station in working order, we couldn't for the life of us cleanly desolder a cap, and ended up quitting after 4 for fear of burning up the board and breaking something. I followed GC8TECH's recapping video, and although I think our Aoyue desoldering station is good, we were unable to achieve the same results.
The same happened last year, when I recapped my brother's childhood Turbo Duo, which I managed to fix the audio problems on by recapping the audio caps only, but did not complete a full recap. The Duo works fine now, but fills the room with a strange fishy smell when powered on.
Anyway, the PGM appears to be still working properly, but I'm concerned that if we did manage to burn or lift a pad on the board, I wouldn't know it, since I can't see a good way to test connectivity to the caps with my multimeter. I have no plans to complete either recapping project, which is a shame, since I wanted to recap some Game Gears and install the GGTV I bought a long time ago. It's just too destructive of a process. I just wanted to share my frustration with recapping in general, and get some feedback. Everyone says how important it is, with no regard for how difficult or dangerous it is for the hardware.
Anyway, getting to the point, recapping looks simple enough for most equipment -- just tedious. That, however, has not been my experience. I just starting recapping my later revision PGM (the one without the coin cell) and only managed 4 of 13 caps. Despite having the desoldering station in working order, we couldn't for the life of us cleanly desolder a cap, and ended up quitting after 4 for fear of burning up the board and breaking something. I followed GC8TECH's recapping video, and although I think our Aoyue desoldering station is good, we were unable to achieve the same results.
The same happened last year, when I recapped my brother's childhood Turbo Duo, which I managed to fix the audio problems on by recapping the audio caps only, but did not complete a full recap. The Duo works fine now, but fills the room with a strange fishy smell when powered on.
Anyway, the PGM appears to be still working properly, but I'm concerned that if we did manage to burn or lift a pad on the board, I wouldn't know it, since I can't see a good way to test connectivity to the caps with my multimeter. I have no plans to complete either recapping project, which is a shame, since I wanted to recap some Game Gears and install the GGTV I bought a long time ago. It's just too destructive of a process. I just wanted to share my frustration with recapping in general, and get some feedback. Everyone says how important it is, with no regard for how difficult or dangerous it is for the hardware.