My 6 y/o reported on Saturday that our a-bit-older-than-the-six-year-old LG TV was broken. My first thought was soccer ball.. turns out the thing just wouldn’t get past the boot sequence, and was just feezing on a giant LG logo. Unresponsive to reboot.. the old unplug for however long trick didn’t work.. web search told me that the motherboard was toast, and stupid expensive to replace.
So that was mostly that.. trip to Costco for a new TV on Sunday and the whole works. It was bugging me though, so I started digging into YouTube videos. One guy managed to get his TV past the start screen by popping the back cover off and cranking on the motherboard with a hair dryer. Huh.. I could do that better. I remembered that people ‘fixed’ gen 1 xbox units by throwing the thing in the oven.. let’s try that.
The kids were home from school for President’s Day, so we had a PTO day project.
Step 1: Dissasembly
Step 2: Yank Motherboard (the before pic)
Step 3: Bake and wait
I let it rip for 8 minutes at 385, cool with the oven door open for 10 minutes, and then drop to room temp under the oven hood.
Step 4: Damage Control
After the heat sink was down to a reasonable temp, I started to access the damage. Solder definitely ran, as anticipated. Huh.
Step 5: Cereal Break
Step 6: Tada
That’s pretty much that. We have a TV in our bedroom now. All of the ports are working, and the picture looks as good as ever. Need to update the resume to include ‘TV / VCR Repair.’