Arts and crafts...


Well, sometimes different crafts and skills are necessary... My son's good headphones needed a new jack, so today I proceeded to change it.
Jacks are usually a part that breaks down quickly in headphones, but luckily they can be substituted  and they are cheap.. The only "difficult" thing is that they usually need soldering, and I'm not very good at it (basically as I rarely have to do it).
Anyway, first of all I had to cut the old jack and peel the threads for some length.... In this headphones set there are three wires sometimes they are 4. Colours may vary, here they were rather standard, that is red, green  and copper...Copper  is the ground, while red and green are the left and right channel  (not necessarily in this order..Actually I discovered that on my son's headphones they were the opposite than they should have been! There are many sites explaining how to connect the cables, but basically the right/left correspondnce is indicative. And of course you'll discover you soldered wrongly only _at the end_ of your work, as the tiny wires really make contact only after you've soldered them).



These wires have practically no insulation, that is the insulation is given by the thin coat of colour... One must be careful not to damage it  as it's very easy to burn it with the soldering iron.



 Here I burned the cable tips with the soldering iron and covered them with tin.. this way it will be easier to attach them to the jack



Here it is! not a perfect work, but it's done... Now I only have to pinch the cable with the metallic part  so that it won't be torn away if the cable is pulled. Then the plastic cover is put back in place, and the headphone is fixed!

Comments

is there hope for me? seasons greetings...
Elena said…
:-) Definitely, there's hope for everybody! I'm sure that skills one gets from one crafts technique are applicable to others as well... For example the precision one gets from embroidery helps when it's applied to other works too. Sometimes one must only find the courage (or the necessity!) to try...
Have a happy new year!