I officially gave up on this. I'm simply incapable of using these tools, no amount of YouTube videos and reading about techniques help me, not 60W iron, not desoldering wig, not the pump, nothing. All I managed to do this evening was free one hole and left a bunch of smears on the board.

I think it's best if I just forget about it and throw the router in the trash.

I guess some of us just weren't meant to be able to do self-repairs. Some may say recapping is not that hard, but for some of us, it is very hard, downright impossible.

Surviving your first week of learning to solder with most of your fingers and eyes intact is usually seen as good progress, for the actual soldering part, for many things like this it is said that you have to be prepared to really suck at it for a while in order to get better.

Think I'll still play with it later today. Soldering might actually be doable and behaves more like on YouTube, judging by the desoldering method with applying solder and using the pump, with which I've actually managed to free ONE hole and didn't leave much traces, but the actual desoldering...mission impossible! Very difficult to reproduce the success.

Don't trust the YouTube, 🤣, these guys are pros. Hat down to anyone who can do this thing.

In the end I did it, old capacitors out, new capacitors in. The clumsy one just needs a lot of time. Desoldering pump seems to work well, unless you fail to heat the right area well, which must have been my problem.

But it was only partial solution at best. The one capacitor where the power goes in must have really been kaput, at least that area doesn't measure 0L on the multimeter anymore. But where second and the last one from where power goes in are connected, with new ones in place, they still read 0L. I did measure new ones before connecting them and they're fine.

Something else must still be shorted. I guess this is where easy fixes end. Behavior with more decent power supply remains the same, the power is cut shortly after powering up due to short circuit.