Taking work

Short version: I do board-level repair, and I’m taking work. Here’s the page.

Longer version below, because I think the why matters more than the pitch.

Most repair isn’t repair

Take a laptop somewhere with a dead port and you’ll usually get a quote for a logic board. Not a component — the board. The diagnosis stops at “which module do we swap,” because that’s the model the industry is built around: replacement at the largest convenient unit, billed accordingly.

Sometimes that’s genuinely right. Often it’s a $12 part and forty minutes with a microscope, and the board goes in a bin instead.

I’d rather find the one part that actually failed and fix that. That’s board-level repair. It’s slower per job and it doesn’t scale, which is exactly why the shops don’t do it — and also why it’s the part I find worth doing.

How this happened

I’ve spent twenty-odd years keeping systems alive at the software and network layer. At some point the same instinct went physical: instead of a stack trace, a fault on a board; instead of a bad deploy, a rail that’s pulling current it shouldn’t be. Same job — figure out what’s actually wrong instead of restarting the thing and hoping.

The vintage machines pulled hardest. Recapping a board from the 80s and watching it boot again is a very specific kind of satisfying, and it’s the direct line back to why I got into computers at all.

Then the bench filled up. Microscope, hot air, thermal camera, a short-finder, a wall of instruments — and enough of it that I started building tooling for it and printing organizers for it. At some point a hobby with this much equipment behind it should probably do some work for other people.

What I take

Microsoldering — fine-pitch and BGA rework, lifted pads, broken traces, connector replacement. Component-level diagnosis on logic boards. Regular computer repair too, the diagnosis-and-fix work that doesn’t need a scope. Vintage restoration and recapping. ECU work is on the roadmap, not offered yet.

And a few things I won’t take, which I’ve put on the page as plainly as I can: boards someone else has already had a go at, anything still under manufacturer warranty, and jobs where the data is the real objective — that’s a recovery lab, and going in with a soldering iron first can make their job harder.

Saying no clearly up front is part of the offer. It’s how you avoid wasting someone’s money finding out.

How it works

No ticketing system, no storefront. Tell me what you’ve got and I’ll be straight with you about whether I can fix it, what it’ll take, and when the answer is no. No-fix, no-fee on diagnosis. The usual caveat with any board work applies: back up anything you can’t afford to lose. I’ll be careful, but I can’t be responsible for data on a device that’s already failing.

The Repair Services page has a button that opens an email with the useful questions already laid out — device, symptom, what changed, what you’ve tried. Fill in what you know, skip what you don’t. Photos of the board help more than anything else you can send.

That’s it. The bench is set up, the lights are on, and I’d like to fix your thing.