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| Standard USB end on the left inserts to the plug. Micro USB end on the right inserts into the cellphone. |
Of course prior to any procedure one has to do a bit of research and a physical. Usually short problems occur at junctions where the wire attaches to the micro USB end or the standard USB end (as was the case here). The wire is comprised of 4 colored wires (red, white, green and black as indicated below) surrounded by a wire-mesh shield. For charging purposes, only two of the wires are really needed, red (+5V) and black (ground). So the assumption was that either one or both of these two wires would have been the location of the short.
As most surgeons would do, I fired up some Chopin, and started to cut away a portion of the hard black plastic casing of the standard USB end to gain exposure to the obvious short site. The wire-mesh shield was found to be broken at the site and was 'dissected' away to expose the 4 colored wires. The green, black, and white wires appeared fine, but the plastic sheet covering the red wire at this junction seemed a bit flimsy. A small strip of cardboard was placed to isolate the red (+5V) wire.
Then a small segment of red plastic was stripped to expose the bare wire.
The short was identified as indicated below
The wire was cut at the area of the break, the plastic ends were stripped back, and the wire ends were reconnected with flux / solder.
Electrical tape was used to cover the exposed wire. The wire-mesh shield was then reconstructed with additional wire and reconnected with solder.
Electrical tape was then used to surround the entire reconstruction, and a wooden 'splint' of adequate length was measured and applied to the construct as shown below.
So the purpose of the wooden splint is to minimize the about of bending that would normally occur in the wire at the USB end.
When put to the test, it worked. Hip hip hooray, That was fun :). Guess it's always good to have an extra charger around.
