I screwed up a ram chip repair - thrashed circuit board - can a newbie recover?

[jhuie]

Hi all,

I have attempted a repair on an arcade game and damaged the board.
I've done these things before successfully so I'm not completely a
newbie but I'm certainly not "seasoned" at this stuff. But here's what
happened....

There was a bad RAM chip soldered to the board. My plan was to solder
in a socket for the repair. I clipped the old chip off and removed all
the pins. But had difficulty extracting a couple of them because I
clipped them to short. So I removed them from the other side but ended
up doing 2 things. First, I pulled away part of the traces because the
board is very old. Second, since I insisted on moving forward even
though I didn't really have the right tool (my soldering iron tip is
like the size of my thumb), I ended up scorching the board a bit in
that area so I can't even see where the traces should really go.

It's a Zaxxon game. I have a schematic....and can sort of read them...
sort of....is there hope for me fixing this myself? The value of the
game isn't really high enough to justify a professional repair guy.
Thoughts? Thank you!

 

[Mike Berger]

First, get a proper temperature controlled soldering iron with
a suitable tip.

You can cut the damaged traces with an x-acto knife and solder
30 ga. jumpers (use wire intended for wire-wrapping, and get
a proper stripper for it, as it is delicate) to the traces
where they are cut to the components.