I am a friend of a famous Apple products repair person and one of the things I've learned through our friendship is just how fragile repairs can be. As this individual quickly learned, putting a MacBook Air logic board into an oven is a terrible idea. Do not under any circumstances do it with your computers. It is one of the worst fallacies of DIY repair out there.
What you're trying to do (as he stated in the article) is that you're trying to reflow the poorly adherent solder beads in the hopes that you'll fix the faulty connection. But the way you're doing it introduces the risk of damaging the PCB and the ICs themselves through thermal stresses and gaseous expansion by any trapped ambient moisture. This will irreparably damage your board and it will lead to the phenomena he experienced here. ("popcorning")
The right way to do it involves a directed hot air gun and proper equipment so that you aren't imposing excessive thermal stresses onto the board as a whole. If you don't know how to do that, then please send it to someone who does. There are several good repair outfits out there right now who specialize in this and can help you out.
Do not repeat this person's mistake. This DIY method is like doing cardiac surgery with a chainsaw. It's a terrible idea for your data and wallet.
When doing this I typically use a very small and controllable butane torch with tin foil as a heat shield over nearby components.
Even then I always communicate to the person that the repair is intended to facilitate RECOVERY ONLY and that all bets are off on the machine being long-term usable again. Usually this is only useful for large BGA chips. Unfortunately Apple laptops made the past 10 years use BGA chips almost exclusively through logic board design.
FWIW, I did this with a 2011 MacBook pro 17" 7 times, and it worked every time. Each time it worked for about 3 months, and then the video card would glitch out again. Finally, apple did a warrantee extension on that logic board and replaced it.
You probably should use a hot air gun or a reflow oven, but the toaster method should provide similar results if used properly. A non-nitrogen, non-convection, infrared radiant heating reflow oven is basically just a precise toaster oven.
You can achieve radiant heating of particular sections of a board by cutting aluminum foil to expose or cover particular board sections. You can insulate the board to prevent excess heat soak, you can take apart the oven to force it to ramp heat more slowly, and cooling is trivial. You can also remove moisture ahead of time by enclosing the board in a plastic bag with silica gel or calcium chloride, or a very long, slow heat ramp. (Or just leave the board in a sunny window in a dry environment)
The above is correct. Do not do it. In addition, even with hot air soldering equipment, "reflowing" the chips on the board is not a reliable method of fixing the problem. Even if you temporarily improve things, symptoms will likely re-appear.
If the problem is indeed in the connections below BGA chips, the proper solution is reballing, which involves desoldering and lifting the entire chip off the board, cleaning the entire area, then reballing, placing and soldering it in again. This is a non-trivial operation that requires specialized equipment.
Worked just fine for me on an early 2007 Mac Book Pro that had a known Nvidia GPU issue. I did it in late 2012, when it was only worth about $200-250 on craigslist. After the bake, it worked fine for the next 2 years, but I was paranoid it would crap out again, stopped using it as my primary after a year.
> The right way to do it involves a directed hot air gun and proper equipment so that you aren't imposing excessive thermal stresses onto the board as a whole. If you don't know how to do that, then please send it to someone who does. There are several good repair outfits out there right now who specialize in this and can help you out.
Even this method is fraught with danger, at least if one is doing it at home. I have decades of experience with soldering and repairing boards with SMT components and I am hesitant to use a heat gun on a board unless it's a last resort. A couple of years ago I had a Mac mini 2011 logic board with the infamous AMD Radeon BGA warping issue, and I attempted a heat gun repair following best practices. I got another six months out of the board before it started having video issues again, and another attempt to revive it failed. I didn't have anything but time invested in it (it was given to me as scrap when it failed the previous owner), but I'd never use a repaired board like that as a production machine because it will fail again and soon.
Reflowing ovens and home ovens are totally different animals. Reflow ovens use closed loop temperature controllers. A ramping profile gently heats the board to a preheat temp just below reflow (drives out moisture and other outgassing), holds it for a bit, then ramp to the final reflow temp and holds that for less than a minute (possibly seconds) before quickly backing down to preheat followed by a cooling cycle. Many manufacturers specify these times and temperatures in their datasheets for components as well.
You can turn an electric toaster oven into a reflow oven with a cheap programmable closed loop temperature controller. Though I don't know how even the heating would be or how effective depending on the model.
And this is why I spent $100 on a hot air gun for my video game console repairs & restorations instead of trying to do DIY reballing without proper equipment (which is $$$).
Consistent and controlled heat are absolutely vital when working with tiny SMD components.
In some cases there's nothing to lose. Got an old HP LaserJet free that had a similar issue and wouldn't boot. Used the oven to 'reflow', now have a working printer.
Not sure why you are so strongly saying people shouldn't do it. I've done it before and know people who have, and it's always been for a broken/out-of-warranty machine anyway. So its either trash or will be fixed so it's not really a risk.
A possible (probable?) issue is your oven. In my experience, they heat in cycles: if you set one to 180 it will heat to 240, then cool to 150, then .... Etc. Even a large electric range will cycle with a range of temperatures. In other words they are designed to maintain an average temperature rather than constant.
In addition there issue of calibration. Even expensive full size ovens can be significantly off.
How do I know this? I worked with Japanese laquer (Urushi) which was baked onto metal for bonding. But Urushi is the sap of a tree related to poison oak and over-heating leads to fumes that are not great. Experiments with small (toaster) ovens and large electric ranges produced bad results.
Most electric kilns for ceramics, especially those that are computer controlled, are highly recommended for sensitive work where temperature control is important.
I mean even if the oven were perfectly calibrated for air temperature the radiation from the exposed elements would almost always cause this to happen. He’s basically grilled his motherboard not baked it, try baking a cake in that oven and I bet it’s also burned on the top and soggy in the middle.
The obvious solution if you must use that oven is to wrap the board in silver foil first and it might have had a chance.
I've done stupider things during last ditch repairs. Once time I replaced the tantalum caps on a board blindly hoping that it would cure a power rail short. I'd never used SMD tants before and didn't know that the band was a + band and not a - band.
Within 3 seconds of applying power, there was a fireworks display which destroyed the board entirely :)
Tantalum caps are great fun. I remember we would booby-trap each other's breadboards with them in EE lab, to this day I'm still extra vigilant about polarity of all components. Measure twice, apply power once.
Regular electrolytic caps also make a nice pop and ball of fuzz, often the shell will fly across the room at good speed. Also they have that unforgettable odor of shame that will follow whatever you were working on for a few hours.
I don't know if this has been said or not already - but I wouldn't use that oven again for cooking food, especially since something somewhere off-gassed.
I don't know how dangerous it would be to eat food from an oven that was previously used for reflow soldering; if I had to guess, the danger would be minimal - maybe an increased risk of cancer or something like that. Likely, the fumes or whatnot was simply rosin flux vaporizing.
Rosin flux is usually something like refined pine resin with a solvent; it won't kill you to eat it (or breath in the smoke while soldering - though that can be a major irritant), but I am almost certain it might cause a flavoring issue for future baked foods.
Then again - maybe it would lend those holiday dinners a festive flavor?
I heated a Nvidia 780 graphics card a few times using a heat gun and a laser thermometer (max 200 degree c). I did not want to use my oven as I don't want to risk it. That revived the gpu 2 times, going from vga quality and weird screen artifacts, to no issues at all, 2-3 months with each bake. In the end i bought a new one as it really is temporary.
I repaired a 2009 iMac gpu the same way with a heat gun but that was good for two years each time the first two times and didn’t work the third time. It’s worth a shot if you strongly suspect broken solder ball.
We used to "fix" our old XBox consoles by wrapping them in towels and purposely overheating them to get the ?GPU? solder to reflow correctly. With some extra cooling methods added, still works to this day even though it got a red ring of death.
I also had the overheating RROD. The problem with the 360 was the CPU heatsink mounting hardware was insufficient to maintain contact and the board would warp. It was easy enough to fix with a set of screws from the hardware store to replace the crappy 'X' clip, plus some PC thermal grease like Arctic Silver.
Relatively speaking, the CPU heatsink was massive compared to the GPU. I would assume the engineers designing it knew that the CPU was going to run very hot, especially when it launched on a 90nm architecture.
Difference here is that overheating the GPU will always apply heat directly to the specific solder area in question. It’s actually a pretty good trick.
After doing the towel trick I laid my 360 on top of a big fan so it always had cool air being forced into it. It was RROD-free until eventually a thunderstorm took it out for good along with my router.
After flickering unhappily for a while, part of the screen backlight on my trusty Lenovo laptop recently died, rendering screen usable but hightly annoying. Short of actually buying a spare part and swapping out, I did absolutely everything imaginable, including liberal amounts of percussive maintenance: Opened the thing up, had the whole screen out, checked connections as best I could, squeezed and flexed, had the screen out again, squeezed some more - you know how these things go.
So, the machine is stranded on my desk, hooked up to a stationary screen, lid kept slightly ajar. The most laidback member of the household comes by, a fully grown male of species felis catus. Apparently slams the lid shut and goes to sleep on laptop for the duration of the night.
I baked a dead graphics card in the oven and it hasn't failed for half a year or so until I replaced it with something better. It probably wasn't the smartest thing I ever did and I wouldn't recommend it unless to anyone unless they have an oven they aren't going to use for food anymore in a well ventilated are (which was not the case for me).
The card had bad graphics glitches in whatever mode the BIOS puts it in and would cause boot to fail at an early stage.
First I disassembled the card and ensures that all remaining components were heat resistant and that there was nothing that seemed likely to fall off on the bottom side. I carefully mounted it in the oven on some balls of tinfoil. I also added a thermometer that came with a cheap multimeter because I didn't feel inclined to trust the oven not to overshoot.
I ramped the temperature up slowly, using hot air and keeping it under 100°C for a while in hopes of getting out any water and keeping it from going popcorn. When raising the temperature to the point where I expected the solder to go soft (can't remember the exact temperature) the thing suddenly started to smell rather badly (but not burnt), forcing me to open the windows and leaving the room most of the time. At that point I got worried about the fumes and where they might condensate but decided to go through with it, heating it up a bit further and then cooling it down slowly.
In the aftermath I got a working graphics card and a smelly oven. The smell went away after a few hours at max temperature, a lot of ventilation and some cleaning. I hope there wasn't a health issue with any substaces remaining in the oven as the smell was gone and food doesn't really get in direct contact with the inside of the oven. Anyway, it's the reason why I wouldn't recommend it or do it again.
I actually once (kind of) fixed a permanent startup blue screen on my years-old LG G3 by putting the motherboard in the oven.
It worked again for ~2 months, which gave me plenty of time to backup all local data. Then the blue screen returned and after trying to bake it again, it would not power on at all anymore.
Trying to randomly unsolder and put back resistors or other components when you don’t know what the error is is another bad idea.
The author should have tried to actually attempt to fix the logic board first. But before all that he should have inspected the board and use a voltmeter to see what the issue is. But even doing that he might need a replacement part.
> With confidence high and the bake nearly finished, for the final 60 seconds I thought I’d go off-piste and crank up the temperature to 180 °C - I wanted to make sure things were cooked through. Curiously peering through the oven window, all hell broke loose within 30 seconds: The room filled with sounds of popcorn being made as resistors and components desoldered themselves from the logic board and dropped onto the oven floor. The previously clear air was replaced with an acrid haze. Then the bake reached it’s finale as the logic board bowed up in the middle, accompanied by the screeching sound of the CPU being wrenched off its socket. I lunged for the power switch and yanked open the oven door, hoping to limit damage. Then, as quickly as the bowing started, everything calmed down and the board returned to its original shape. With the board still hot, a wooden spoon was employed to desperately poke the CPU back onto its mount - with little success.
I'm sorry about your MacBook, and I just wanted to thank you for this wonderfully evocative bit of writing which made my day.
For those that didn't read the article the error he made was using a small toaster oven. And then cranking up the heat at the last moment. The oven's thermostat is reading the current air temperature. But the heating coils are radiative. A small oven has wild temperature fluctuations. And when the coils are active they put out a lot more heat than whatever is dailed into the thermostat.
I recently repaired our iMac GPU after it started acting strange. Baked it in a convection oven for 6 minutes at 160° and not a second more. I also used a heavy baking sheet as a heat sink. I did not need a reflow station and if it failed I would have simply ordered a replacement GPU.
I actually managed to temporarily fix a laptop using a torch-like lighter directed at the GPU. This particular batch of laptops had faulty solder connecting the GPU to the board. The heat and cooling would eventually crack the solder and disconnect the GPU.
I had nothing to loose and saw a video about it on YouTube. So I cracked it open and ran the flame around the GPU for several minutes. I eventually got it boot up and it lasted for another 9 months and then I needed to do the process again. I did it a few more times and probably got another year and half out of the laptop.
Great writing, I'll make sure to suggest "percussive maintenance" from now on. Still leaves us wondering what would've happened with a less confident chef !
You may find that Debian with LXDE+Xfce installed (and the non-free repository enabled, for firmware components) will work quite a bit better than Lubuntu for the laptop you picked as your MacBook Air replacement. Recent versions of *buntu seem to be a bit bloated compared to available alternatives, and this especially matters on older hardware.
[+] [-] areoform|7 years ago|reply
What you're trying to do (as he stated in the article) is that you're trying to reflow the poorly adherent solder beads in the hopes that you'll fix the faulty connection. But the way you're doing it introduces the risk of damaging the PCB and the ICs themselves through thermal stresses and gaseous expansion by any trapped ambient moisture. This will irreparably damage your board and it will lead to the phenomena he experienced here. ("popcorning")
The right way to do it involves a directed hot air gun and proper equipment so that you aren't imposing excessive thermal stresses onto the board as a whole. If you don't know how to do that, then please send it to someone who does. There are several good repair outfits out there right now who specialize in this and can help you out.
Do not repeat this person's mistake. This DIY method is like doing cardiac surgery with a chainsaw. It's a terrible idea for your data and wallet.
Edit: Here's a guide that outlines these issues and offers ways to do it properly with the right equipment. The "popcorning" is called board delamination. https://www.latticesemi.com/-/media/LatticeSemi/Documents/Ap...
[+] [-] busterarm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zelon88|7 years ago|reply
Even then I always communicate to the person that the repair is intended to facilitate RECOVERY ONLY and that all bets are off on the machine being long-term usable again. Usually this is only useful for large BGA chips. Unfortunately Apple laptops made the past 10 years use BGA chips almost exclusively through logic board design.
[+] [-] abakker|7 years ago|reply
Just my 2¢ to say that it does work sometimes.
[+] [-] benj111|7 years ago|reply
I don't think I would like my first attempt to be on something expensive but its possible.
https://www.freetronics.com.au/pages/surface-mount-soldering...
http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/smtoast.html
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/introduc...
[+] [-] peterwwillis|7 years ago|reply
You can achieve radiant heating of particular sections of a board by cutting aluminum foil to expose or cover particular board sections. You can insulate the board to prevent excess heat soak, you can take apart the oven to force it to ramp heat more slowly, and cooling is trivial. You can also remove moisture ahead of time by enclosing the board in a plastic bag with silica gel or calcium chloride, or a very long, slow heat ramp. (Or just leave the board in a sunny window in a dry environment)
[+] [-] jwr|7 years ago|reply
If the problem is indeed in the connections below BGA chips, the proper solution is reballing, which involves desoldering and lifting the entire chip off the board, cleaning the entire area, then reballing, placing and soldering it in again. This is a non-trivial operation that requires specialized equipment.
[+] [-] markstos|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouc|7 years ago|reply
I followed the instructions from : http://russell.heistuman.com/2010/04/27/cooking-the-books-or...
[+] [-] morganvachon|7 years ago|reply
Even this method is fraught with danger, at least if one is doing it at home. I have decades of experience with soldering and repairing boards with SMT components and I am hesitant to use a heat gun on a board unless it's a last resort. A couple of years ago I had a Mac mini 2011 logic board with the infamous AMD Radeon BGA warping issue, and I attempted a heat gun repair following best practices. I got another six months out of the board before it started having video issues again, and another attempt to revive it failed. I didn't have anything but time invested in it (it was given to me as scrap when it failed the previous owner), but I'd never use a repaired board like that as a production machine because it will fail again and soon.
[+] [-] devwastaken|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kensai|7 years ago|reply
Wasn't there a funny game on Steam for that? Surgeon something.
[+] [-] MisterTea|7 years ago|reply
You can turn an electric toaster oven into a reflow oven with a cheap programmable closed loop temperature controller. Though I don't know how even the heating would be or how effective depending on the model.
[+] [-] vanadium|7 years ago|reply
Consistent and controlled heat are absolutely vital when working with tiny SMD components.
[+] [-] dddddaviddddd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamvalve|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] busterarm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinator|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nathanvanfleet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] talkingtab|7 years ago|reply
In addition there issue of calibration. Even expensive full size ovens can be significantly off.
How do I know this? I worked with Japanese laquer (Urushi) which was baked onto metal for bonding. But Urushi is the sap of a tree related to poison oak and over-heating leads to fumes that are not great. Experiments with small (toaster) ovens and large electric ranges produced bad results.
Most electric kilns for ceramics, especially those that are computer controlled, are highly recommended for sensitive work where temperature control is important.
[+] [-] ScottFree|7 years ago|reply
Reballing flip chip GPUs is BULLSHIT - the truth about dead laptop GPUs & repairing them. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AcEt073Uds
Luckily, he also shows the proper way to do it:
Linus Attempts BGA Graphics Chip Repair! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shn7LdIrViQ
[+] [-] dehrmann|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|7 years ago|reply
The obvious solution if you must use that oven is to wrap the board in silver foil first and it might have had a chance.
[+] [-] setquk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iSnow|7 years ago|reply
It's surprisingly hurtful if one of those little fuckers explodes between your thumb and index finger.
[+] [-] henryackerman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snovv_crash|7 years ago|reply
Regular electrolytic caps also make a nice pop and ball of fuzz, often the shell will fly across the room at good speed. Also they have that unforgettable odor of shame that will follow whatever you were working on for a few hours.
[+] [-] cr0sh|7 years ago|reply
I don't know how dangerous it would be to eat food from an oven that was previously used for reflow soldering; if I had to guess, the danger would be minimal - maybe an increased risk of cancer or something like that. Likely, the fumes or whatnot was simply rosin flux vaporizing.
Rosin flux is usually something like refined pine resin with a solvent; it won't kill you to eat it (or breath in the smoke while soldering - though that can be a major irritant), but I am almost certain it might cause a flavoring issue for future baked foods.
Then again - maybe it would lend those holiday dinners a festive flavor?
[+] [-] Spacemolte|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shereadsthenews|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bArray|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iClaudiusX|7 years ago|reply
Relatively speaking, the CPU heatsink was massive compared to the GPU. I would assume the engineers designing it knew that the CPU was going to run very hot, especially when it launched on a 90nm architecture.
[+] [-] _dan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SlowRobotAhead|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|7 years ago|reply
Wrap them up in blankets, powered on, and wait a few hours.
[+] [-] ascagnel_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] interfixus|7 years ago|reply
So, the machine is stranded on my desk, hooked up to a stationary screen, lid kept slightly ajar. The most laidback member of the household comes by, a fully grown male of species felis catus. Apparently slams the lid shut and goes to sleep on laptop for the duration of the night.
Machine has been fine ever since.
[+] [-] encypruon|7 years ago|reply
I baked a dead graphics card in the oven and it hasn't failed for half a year or so until I replaced it with something better. It probably wasn't the smartest thing I ever did and I wouldn't recommend it unless to anyone unless they have an oven they aren't going to use for food anymore in a well ventilated are (which was not the case for me).
The card had bad graphics glitches in whatever mode the BIOS puts it in and would cause boot to fail at an early stage.
First I disassembled the card and ensures that all remaining components were heat resistant and that there was nothing that seemed likely to fall off on the bottom side. I carefully mounted it in the oven on some balls of tinfoil. I also added a thermometer that came with a cheap multimeter because I didn't feel inclined to trust the oven not to overshoot.
I ramped the temperature up slowly, using hot air and keeping it under 100°C for a while in hopes of getting out any water and keeping it from going popcorn. When raising the temperature to the point where I expected the solder to go soft (can't remember the exact temperature) the thing suddenly started to smell rather badly (but not burnt), forcing me to open the windows and leaving the room most of the time. At that point I got worried about the fumes and where they might condensate but decided to go through with it, heating it up a bit further and then cooling it down slowly.
In the aftermath I got a working graphics card and a smelly oven. The smell went away after a few hours at max temperature, a lot of ventilation and some cleaning. I hope there wasn't a health issue with any substaces remaining in the oven as the smell was gone and food doesn't really get in direct contact with the inside of the oven. Anyway, it's the reason why I wouldn't recommend it or do it again.
[+] [-] eigenloss|7 years ago|reply
https://rossmanngroup.com/
[+] [-] cseelus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silvester23|7 years ago|reply
It worked again for ~2 months, which gave me plenty of time to backup all local data. Then the blue screen returned and after trying to bake it again, it would not power on at all anymore.
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|7 years ago|reply
Trying to randomly unsolder and put back resistors or other components when you don’t know what the error is is another bad idea.
The author should have tried to actually attempt to fix the logic board first. But before all that he should have inspected the board and use a voltmeter to see what the issue is. But even doing that he might need a replacement part.
[+] [-] nicky0|7 years ago|reply
I'm sorry about your MacBook, and I just wanted to thank you for this wonderfully evocative bit of writing which made my day.
[+] [-] yardie|7 years ago|reply
I recently repaired our iMac GPU after it started acting strange. Baked it in a convection oven for 6 minutes at 160° and not a second more. I also used a heavy baking sheet as a heat sink. I did not need a reflow station and if it failed I would have simply ordered a replacement GPU.
[+] [-] rootlocus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wvenable|7 years ago|reply
I had nothing to loose and saw a video about it on YouTube. So I cracked it open and ran the flame around the GPU for several minutes. I eventually got it boot up and it lasted for another 9 months and then I needed to do the process again. I did it a few more times and probably got another year and half out of the laptop.
[+] [-] hannofcart|7 years ago|reply
Words to live by. :)
[+] [-] hycaria|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0815test|7 years ago|reply