This Repair Café was held at the Museum of American Heritage from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM, though I only stayed till 2:30.

The first thing I worked on was an electric fly swatter whose battery wires had broken off, causing the owner to use it while it was plugged in to a charger (I’d assume some portable charger). At some point, the charger wire had gotten snagged and pulled the Micro USB charging port out with it. I looked for an old PCB with a charging port to salvage, but could not find one, so I decided (with the owner’s approval) to just solder a USB cable directly to the fly swatter PCB and hold it in place with hot glue. I also resoldered the disconnected battery wire.

In the whole disassembly and repair process (we also did a bit of cleaning), we somehow lost the plastic button and switch slider. The owner was able to find the button lying around on the ground outside, but we were unable to find the slider, so he decided to just glue a piece of plastic onto the switch and use it as a slider.

Someone also brought in a Yamaha synthesizer keyboard which wouldn’t turn on. It turned out that one of the PCB traces attached to the DC barrel jack was cracked, presumably due to some violent event. I used a piece of copper wire to bridge the gap, soldering it between the offending pin on the DC jack and the next solder joint on the trace (after the crack). This was sufficient to fix it completely, and the synthesizer worked under external power as well as battery power after that.