[sdiy] Reflow revisited and a bit OT, sorry

[Olav Martin Kvern]

David Ingebretsen wrote: "He has a broken X-Box, presumably with the 
standard flaky solder joint problems. While the X-Box is clearly off 
topic, the desire to reflow the PCB is not."

My son and I recently repaired his XBox 360, which was displaying the 
"red ring of death." We started by replacing the X-clamps that hold the 
heat sinks to the tops of the CPU and GPU* (I highly recommend this 
step, by the way--it means that you can adjust the heat sink tension 
later without having to completely tear down the XBox), then we baked 
the board in a standard electric oven for 3 hours at ~170 degrees F.

This worked perfectly--the machine has been running (non-stop, as far as 
I can tell) for months since the repair. We're planning to fix another 
later this week--as it turns out, several of his friends have the same 
problem.

So...no "weird oven" required, as far as I can tell.

Thanks,

Ole

* You will laugh when you see this arrangement.