- The small Panavise that is simply awesome. I don't understand why they don't recommend these anywhere. Here it's about 40 EUR, but it's well worth it.
- A new soldering iron. I got a fairly cheap Velleman to replace my old iron. Works well but the stand is pretty useless and it doesn't come with a sponge.
- Some soder-wick and obviously some nice, thin lead-free solder
- #8 (50mm) torx. This will be your new best friend if you work a lot with Apple laptops. I got a Velleman which was cheap (3 EUR) and came pre-magnetized.
If you haven't soldered in a while (or ever), there's
a really nice tutorial over at
Makezine.com as well as a primer on using a multimeter.
The plastic on these old G3 PowerBooks is pretty
brittle by now from all the heat and long age, so you
have to be extra careful! The problem turned out be a
cold solder joint on the power connector. Works just
fine now.
Working with hardware can be really rewarding - both
in terms of fun and money. It's nice to work on
something that you can actually touch, for a change.
Sad that, in the long run, PC hw hacking is kind
of a dying art because of all the crazy
integration going on. I would not have been able to
pull this off with a MacBook, I bet. That thing's
just one big (actually small) logic board on the
inside. So it's nice that there's still things like
the Makezine.
My next hardware project's going to be building a RS
232 to USB adapter + some logging software for my
trusty and obsolete Protek 506.