4 hours ago, rd457 said:

I'll also take this opportunity to bring to everyone else's attention the fact that you've mentioned to me in reply to a PM I sent that there also seems to be a power supply issue, that you believe no power is being delivered at the IC plug, and you've checked all fuses in both fuse boxes.

Scratch that, update - apparently the other unit powers on fine when plugged in so false alarm.

Unit received. First impressions - 😱. Let the surgery begin. (May post some pics later).

All done as of about 5pm (about six hours of solid work) and posted back in the knick of time. Hopefully should arrive back tomorrow.

Completely dead on arrival.

So much heat had been used that the plastic connector had softened and the pins had shifted, and worse still, the circular bits of trace around each pin hole were all completely gone, they must have burned away, thus the solder on the pins were barely able to contact the traces going off into the board. I tried to fix the connector but it was too far gone, I had to give up on that and steal a replacement from another board. I had to fix all of the trace connections with tiny bits of wire, a rather fiddly time consuming process. It ain't pretty, but best I can do for a case like this.

I also found bits of something between the pins of the CPU/MCU. It cleaned away easily whatever it was. Upon reassembly though I powered it on and the LCD was very dim and then just shut off. This repeated every time I tried. I took it apart again, time very fast running out to get to the post office in time. Taking a punt I reflowed all of the CPU pins. That did it, LCD working perfectly fine after that. Then I got it packaged back up, label purchased and printed, raced to PO and got it in just as the postwoman was collecting them.

Pics to follow...

Makes you wonder what kind of cowboy attempted the atrocious quality of repair before you, and if they had the cheek to charge!

Pin condition before any work:

Something between the CPU pins:

Old solder removed from connector and a little cleaning:

Preparing for repair, exposing some copper from the traces the connector pins need reattaching to, lacking the missing circular bits of trace that should be present around each pin hole:

A tiny bit of wire prepared for the first repair:

First repair with wire soldered into place:

All pins repaired, ignoring the four that are unused. As I said, it's ugly, but sound and the best I can do in the face of such damage. Note that the 6th and 7th from top-left are deliberately joined together, they're a pair of grounds. All joints test out having good continuity to nearest suitable testing point, are electrically isolated from each other as appropriate, including the damaged traces to the right, and the two CAN buses correctly measure ~120 Ohms. You might note that the pin top-right joins to two different traces. The mess to the left is where a couple of unused pads adjacent to the pins had also been burnt away.

All working again, after reflowing CPU joints to fix the LCD power issues mentioned above:

8 minutes ago, StephenFord said:

Makes you wonder what kind of cowboy attempted the atrocious quality of repair before you, and if they had the cheek to charge!

There were some remnants of warranty void stickers so it's definitely been at a company for repair before, and I do recall having had a few done previously by other companies whose work I wasn't impressed with, but this surely has to have been done by someone who'd never done it before and has the complete wrong type of iron, so I suspect a DIY job by a previous owner.

Whatever you charged for that fix up, it wasn't enough! 😆

44 minutes ago, StephenFord said:

Whatever you charged for that fix up, it wasn't enough! 😆

Yeah I'm left with £42.50 after ebay fees and postage, so £7.08/h. Normally I might ask for more for such a big effort but as I understand it money's tight for OP so I'm of mind to just let this one go.