Torching my iBook
Yesterday I summoned up the courage to aim a propane torch directly at the delicate circuitry of my beloved iBook. I had the dreaded Apple G3 iBook logic board failure which involves the ATI Radeon 7500 chip working itself loose with normal case flexing. I tried a trick of putting shims in the case to push the chip back in, but the problem kept getting worse.
I read online that the soldier on the bottom of the chip needed to be reflowed. To reflow the soldier, one has to heat the chip up hot enough to melt the soldier, thus re-establishing contact. Some people have a fancy work station to do this with, others use paint stripping guns, I used a propane torch. Fortunately I had extra iBook with the dead video problem to practice on. I fired the spare iBook up after it cooled down and it worked! I decided to do it to my main machine since if I accidently fried my main iBook, I could use the other one as a backup.
So now my iBook is working great and I put the other iBook back together and am going to sell it to a friend. Good times.