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found a reflow operation in Los Angeles area

T40/T41/T42/T43 Series
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mikeh420
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found a reflow operation in Los Angeles area

#1 Post by mikeh420 » Sun Jul 15, 2012 12:43 pm

Found a place here in the L.A. area that does laptop reflow services for GPUs. I have a T43 with a bad m/b, likely the south bridge chip, which I might let them try and fix. Since I plan to replace the m/b, there's nothing to lose.

What's a good price for the work? They want $75.
ThinkPad T42 2373
Pentium M 1.7GHz
2 GB Kingston RAM
40 GB HDD
Windows 7 Enterprise
2878 Docking Station

Neil
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Re: found a reflow operation in Los Angeles area

#2 Post by Neil » Sun Jul 15, 2012 12:51 pm

A reflow is pretty much worthless since you could do that yourself, and it won't last very long. $75 is even a little high for a professional re-ball job since you can buy re-balled boards for less.
Collection = T430 - T500 - R400 - X300 - T61 (14" WXGA+) - R61 (15" SXGA+) - T60 - X40 - T43p - T43 - T42p - A30P

poshgeordie
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Re: found a reflow operation in Los Angeles area

#3 Post by poshgeordie » Mon Jul 16, 2012 8:12 am

The link Neil supplied is to boards I've reballed and are sold through The Board Room.

Years ago I started in this business reflowing, that is to heat the chips up until the solder balls (hopefully) melt, the idea being that any broken solder joints are remade. Whilst this is good in theory, in practice some of the balls are so past it or have moved too much out of position that not all the joints are remade properly.

Also on the later boards (post June 2006) lead-free solder only was to be used, that that suffers from a number of issues which reheating doesn't solve and these chips have to be reballed, ie removed and replaced with a new set of solder balls.

Regarding the longevity of those early reflow-only repair boards, some were OK, but a lot of others failed for the reasons mentioned above, and with us now doing reball only it's quite rare to get any returns, and those tend to be from Thinkpads which have been heavily used and "abused" and have failed again due to flexing issues - even so they will last for at least a year which I consider to be reasonable.
The normal use ones we never see again!

I'd be very interested in some details on this LA company, and if it helps to give an opinion on them. RBS and myself set up The Board Room because we couldn't find any USA based company who were any good at reballing, so there's no doubt there is a market out there for such a company.

Price-wise, $75 is high but if they are reballing both GPU and Southbridge then it's probably OK. Incidently both chips should be done since if one goes the other's usually not far behind.

mikeh420
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Location: Van Nuys CA

Re: found a reflow operation in Los Angeles area

#4 Post by mikeh420 » Tue Jul 17, 2012 9:49 pm

I found the company in an ad on Craigslist

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/sfv/sy ... 18627.html

haven't had a chance to check them out yet
ThinkPad T42 2373
Pentium M 1.7GHz
2 GB Kingston RAM
40 GB HDD
Windows 7 Enterprise
2878 Docking Station

ajkula66
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Re: found a reflow operation in Los Angeles area

#5 Post by ajkula66 » Tue Jul 17, 2012 9:58 pm

mikeh420 wrote:I found the company in an ad on Craigslist

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/sfv/sy ... 18627.html

haven't had a chance to check them out yet

Given the ad, don't even bother checking them out...
...Knowledge is a deadly friend when no one sets the rules...(King Crimson)

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poshgeordie
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Re: found a reflow operation in Los Angeles area

#6 Post by poshgeordie » Wed Jul 18, 2012 8:48 am

Oh deary me!!

I started off writing a whole lot but realised it was more general information about reballing and reflowing issues that had nothing to do with this topic, so I've I've posted it in Off Topic here.

Onto this one, these lot don't have a clue and make a whole lot of misleading and erroneous statements, typical of non-technical people who are out to try and frighten, impress, and finally draw in potential customers.

Please don't use them, you're likely to just waste your money and become very frustrated.

This comes from someone who does this work every day - today we've successfully reballed the ATI GPU and Intel Southbridge on a MacBook Pro - I'd like to see these jokers doing that!

mikeh420
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Joined: Sun Jun 20, 2010 3:02 pm
Location: Van Nuys CA

Re: found a reflow operation in Los Angeles area

#7 Post by mikeh420 » Wed Jul 18, 2012 12:24 pm

thanks for the advice, it was worth a look (almost!)
ThinkPad T42 2373
Pentium M 1.7GHz
2 GB Kingston RAM
40 GB HDD
Windows 7 Enterprise
2878 Docking Station

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