A Broken flash drive night before finals?

2 days before finals a friend of mine had all her projects on her flash drive and was in a great deal of stress, not only stressed out about not being able to turn in a 175 pt project for her end assignment, she had lost a full quarter of excel spreadsheets, massive word documents, Outlook, Office Procedures etc..

She told me her boyfriend had taken it apart to try and fix it but with no luck, And that she had taken it to the IT department at school and they said no way it was toast. So opened it up and started tinkering with it while it was plugged into my computer and noticed when I wiggled it around the light would blink. This is a great sign!!

So long story short I took it home and got it under my microscope and noticed the plug had ripped away from the board, and all 3 of the metal bands were broke, plus the board its self was broke so this was going to be a challenging fix, I spent a few minutes thinking of the best approach to cross over the output of the board to the USB plug within a very small area,micro millimeters. In comparison the size of a sowing needle on each side of the weld.

I decided to melt 3 little balls of solder the size of a ball point tip of a pen and use little dabs of flux in each output to hold the balls of solder, I started at the middle and worked my way out, the tricky part was having the ball of solder melt and flow over to the plug to make the connection without flowing into the other outputs on each side.

In short thinking outside the box this worked out great and I successfully recovered all her files and the flash drive still works, but part of the deal was that I would get to keep the flash drive to add to my collection of craziness. I just know what comes around goes around. This is the very reason why I decided to become an engineer, not the money, but helping people.

Have a good one friends!