You should use a much thinner wire, perhaps just a single strand from the one currently used. It will be much less mechanically fragile then, and that UV solder mask can be enough of a glue to hold stuff stably in place even during more rough handling. Right now if anything is going to push on the fat wire, it'll break off on the chip end, instead of giving in a little and deforming itself. It will also help to solder that strand on the trace itself rather than the via further away, then there's less material to get disturbed although it can be another difficult challenge to overcome.

As is I would probably use epoxy on the chip end, after everything is properly soldered down. These chips get pretty hot so things like hotglue won't be very stable.

Dammm that's a crazy repair! Congratulations

Tiido wrote on 2024-11-02, 17:52:

You should use a much thinner wire, perhaps just a single strand from the one currently used. It will be much less mechanically fragile then, and that UV solder mask can be enough of a glue to hold stuff stably in place even during more rough handling. Right now if anything is going to push on the fat wire, it'll break off on the chip end, instead of giving in a little and deforming itself. It will also help to solder that strand on the trace itself rather than the via further away, then there's less material to get disturbed although it can be another difficult challenge to overcome.

As is I would probably use epoxy on the chip end, after everything is properly soldered down. These chips get pretty hot so things like hotglue won't be very stable.

Thank you for your suggestion. But honestly, putting that solder ball on the chip was a pure luck. I tried many times to put it on and finally was able to make it. So oh no, I do not want to touch it again.

I could've used a thinner, one strand of the wires but again, I tried it and failed. This was one time I was able to make it work.

So I guess you suggest epoxy over UV solder mask? I don't even have epoxy and don't know how it works. Okay, I gotta study that thing.

Cursed Derp wrote on 2024-11-02, 17:52:

Dammm that's a crazy repair! Congratulations

Thank you so much. I still cannot believe it actually works!

People on Youtube are really awesome to share their repair videos, it helped me a lot.

You can try to see how well the UV cure solder mask holds on some other thing, i.e put a wire in place and see how it'll hold to some handling. But you will still have to be very careful with handling, I have doubts it'll be strong enough to resist nudges to that wire. Perhaps you can put it into a machine where it will be undisturbed, along with a big note along the lines of "to future me : be super careful" 🤣

Not what you want to hear but get rid of this, the wire used is way too heavy and the joint will break off eventually again.
Putting conformal coating on this will make a future repair or fix even harder.

You really need good equipment for this type of repair, especially a good digital microscope and last but not least... a lot of experience.
Having said that, congratulations for a first successful (albeit ugly and fragile) attempt. 😀

I've just repaired a damaged Voodoo 2 a few days ago (it had quite a few missing components + many bent pins, a few broken ones and missing/detached solder pads). This is what I ended up with:

Oh.. okay. Yeah, I know that was my first attempt and looks ugly and fragile.

So the general consensus here tells me that putting UV thingy is a bad idea and try a thinner wire to repair as shown in pictures.

Well, okay, I will try it this weekend. Wish me luck guys. I hope I am not gonna ruin the card.

If you start soldering thin wires, it's hard to stop 😀