 Welcome back to Retro Tech. On today's video I want to try a method of capacity repair that has always intrigued me, yet I've lacked the confidence to really go in and try this. I was worried that doing this method may end up damaging a board by lifting up pads or pulling traces, and so I was always reluctant to try it or of course even recommend it, but today that all changes. We're going to do what they say should not be done, and that is to remove SMD capacitors from a Sony BVM card using pliers. That's right, we're going to use these pliers and we're going to twist and pull off SMD capacitors that are bad inside a Sony BVM video card. Now hopefully nothing will be damaged by doing this method, but that is always a risk. So please note that if you try this, there is a chance you will damage your board and pull up a trace or pull up a pad and have a lot more repair work on your hands. Now after we remove the caps we will clean and inspect the board and the traces and get it ready to be further repaired and serviced, so let's go do it. This card is a BA3 Sony video card, again from a BVM, and it's the BVM1316, and this particular card has tons and tons of capacitors that have failed on it. About every single SMD capacitor that is on this board has failed. Many of them have leaked their electrolytic fluid onto the board and caused damage to the solder mask, and so we're going to have to pull these caps out of the way so we can try to get in here and service and save this board, but this is the before condition of where we're starting on this video card. Now we can come in here with our pliers and just pull out these capacitors. I've already made the kit for them. Let's find a real nasty one in here. How about we'll start with this one right here and we'll just twist, spin it, it breaks free and those legs are so weak on there there's no way they're staying. And then you can see how the pad sits there and stays and so do the legs that were soldered. What's actually breaking is that that leg is the integrity is so bad on the leg of the cap that it breaks and the part that remains is the pad trace and then the legs of the capacitors themselves especially after 30 years. So you could see that comes off pretty clean and the other option would be to heat these up and try to pull these off but if you can see that black goo you can just imagine how much worse it would actually smell as compared to just how it looks. There's another one just pops right off and then pull it out of the way but yeah if you imagine trying to heat that up and get that out of the way we're still going to have to heat these pads up after I try to scrub with some alcohol and get the legs off there and get the pads ready for new caps but let's make this as easy and painless as possible. I'm going to just get this next one right under that and there we go. I'm going to continue doing this and we'll come back and take a look at this board once we've gotten all these off here. Yeah this is a good and juicy one too. Oh there's some fresh fluid right there, gross. The caps have all been removed except for four that were replaced prior to me getting in here and working on it and they seem to be in okay shape. They're actually electrolytics and they were done properly. Let's just look at some of these spots where some of this fish oil I mean it's even fresh see that one right there C411 super fresh on those two spots that spot right there has fresh fluid so this is a spot like right in here where you can see how the pads are still there and now you see those kind of discoloration of metal that's where the legs were and they broke free so the trace that it does all still still look to be there thankfully the board seems to be pretty heavy duty and maybe that means we can get it repaired what I've got to do now is just get it in here and let it take an alcohol bath and then get some brushes out and just scrub this stuff till we can get it all cleared up and then we can go and heat up the soldering iron and clean up these pads here's our board it's been sitting for a good little bit in some 91% isopropyl alcohol and I have used just an extra toothbrush and then I have an actual ESD brush to just gently wipe the board you know brush through and try to get as much of this slime and ooze off that I can you can already see some of the contacts in there for the caps that weren't so bad have come pretty darn clean already what I'm going to do next is I'm going to pull this board out of its alcohol bath we'll let it dry off all right the boards come out of its bath I've gotten it dried off and cleaned up we're ready to go in here now and clean these pads and get those old legs off a lot of them and then we can check it out and see how they look soldering iron is hot and we're ready to go in here and try to fix this board and clean these pads off I've just got some SRA rosin paste flux some fresh solder and then my tools over here to clean and apply the flux as we go hey everybody well unfortunately at some point after I set up my soldering iron and all my tools my camera cut out and I wasn't able to actually capture the footage of me going through and getting all the pads cleared off of both old solder and the legs from those capacitors we'll tell you that all I really did was heat up my iron and then put fresh flux paste on each one of those points right there where the capacitors were I heated it up and then I just cleaned off that with some solder wick so you can easily find tutorials on that and next time I work on this kind of a project I'll definitely make sure that shot it does not get cut out but I am sorry about that we're going to fast forward pass all that little procedure and get straight into a thorough inspection of how the board looks after we finished with that pad cleaning all right this is what our board looks like now I wanted to show you all the spots on here all right we've got some nice beaded solder on those pads everything's really as cleaned up as I could get it without causing more damage to the board and I did run continuity checks to every pad on here and every trace that looked like it was troublesome and they all tested to still work and that's a good thing so if we are successful in recapping this the board should function and then we should save hopefully all the functionality of this bvm by just fixing this one card the one thing I did want to note though is my concern now after cleaning all this are these exposed traces of copper and I need to get some solder mask or you know some trace mask to put on there and cover those traces up because current will run through there and then it'll be live current on all these points and I don't want that to you know impede or affect anything on here we'll try to make it look as nice as possible see there's some trace lines along here and I checked them for continuity and they will actually buzz for current and some of the spots here along the path and I don't want to really involve any additional possibility of interference or degradation down the road if possible at least not to this card because this one will be serviced to the point where it'll be as good as possible and if you want to follow along with the rest of this repair then please check back in but that's probably going to end it for today's session and then we'll go in and have to recap this and the next video on the actual restoration but that's how you get those capacitors off the pads by just pulling them and then you can clean everything up and get the board into this condition where you're ready for new capacitors thanks again for watching everybody I'll see you next time with some more retro content