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I finally walked through a Micro Center in Cambridge and watched a tech fix a bent CPU pin in 10 minutes
I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts a couple weeks ago visiting my sister, and I stopped by the Micro Center there just to kill some time. I wandered over to the service desk and saw a tech working on a customer's motherboard with a bent socket pin. He had a magnifying lamp, a tiny needle, and he just kind of breathed on the pin for a second before nudging it back into place. Whole thing took him about 10 minutes and he didn't charge the guy because the board was still under warranty. I've been doing this work for 12 years and I still get nervous touching LGA sockets, so watching him do it so calm was kind of humbling. What got me was the little card he had taped to his monitor that listed the three tools he uses for pin work and how often he replaces them. Made me think about how much of this job is just having the right habits instead of the right gear. Curious if any of you have a go-to trick for bent pins or if you just send those boards back.
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hunt.ben6d ago
That bit about the card taped to his monitor listing the three tools and how often he replaces them is the real story here. Nobody talks about the wear on the tools themselves, like how a needle gets a tiny bend after a few dozen pins and suddenly you're the one causing damage. Half the bent pins I've seen came from someone using the same tool way past when they should've tossed it.
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