I recently noticed that my Macbook seemed to be running a little hot and the fan was running more often than it had been before. This was a sign to me that the heatsinks were most likely a little dusty and could use a cleaning. So I dove in.

You will be starting on the bottom of the Macbook. Make sure you have a clean cloth to lay the macbook on to avoid scratches.

The bottom panel is held on by 10 pentalobe style screws. They are very small and you may have the buy the driver.

Once you have removed all the screws and placed them in a safe place use a plastic pry tool to slowly go around and separate the bottom. It may seem stuck in the middle as there are two clips that hold the center in. with a small amount of pressure they should pop and allow the bottom panel to become free.

Once you have removed the bottom panel you will be created with something that looks like a robot face looking at you. If you feel uncomfortable you have made it this far.

At this point I grabbed my handy dandy can of air. You can begin dusting out the internals of the machine. focusing on the fans that look like the robots eyes.

Now that you are here I found it best to remove the solid state drive. This is located right under where the touchpad would be on the opposing side. You must first carefully removed the cable attaching it to the logic board with a plastic pry tool. this should not take much force. Then once you have removed the cable you will find that the open portion of the plastic is made to bend so that the drive will pop right out. It should then look like this.

Now you have 8 small philips head screws to remove from what looks like the bottom right and left of this photo. they are located on the small rectangular black plates. They hold in the touch pad.

As you can see there is also a torques bit screw at the top center of this photo that will also have to be removed. Keep in mind that this is not a structural screw but an adjustment. This adjusts the clicking of the touchpad. So when you go to put this back into the computer DO NOT tighten with the power of thor. tighten little by little and test the touch pad as you do this until its to its desired clickability.

Once all of these screws are removed the touchpad will pop out with some gentle fiddling. GENTLE!

Now you can clean around the touchpad. This is helpful for messy people that get food in there… Im not messy but I had this issue. All clean now.

Re assemble and be happy with a nice cool running macbook with a freshly adjusted touchpad.

Alright so we are first going to start with putting a new cable in a rackmount powerstrip. I recently came across this and rather than throwing away a perfectly good power strip you can fix it got about 10 dollars and 30 minutes of your time. Dont be that guy that just throws perfectly good equipment away like the guy I got this from.

I don't have many pictures of the disassembly because thats easy, figure it out.

First things first get the cable out and disconnected. Once having done this I took the ends from the cable and snipped them off. Since I don't have a large supply of bits I had to go and purchase what I needed. Easiest way to get what you need is bring some bits with you.

Now I have what I need so I began preparing the new cable.

This is what we start with; make it look like this.

For the record I realized this was a little to short to work with and lengthened it a bit. It looked like this minus the end I already put on.

Now this brings me to the next portion. You will have all the ends striped and the wires twisted up nicely. You will then find the corresponding bit to color of the wire and place it on the end. Notice it doesnt just magically stay on. You will have to crimp it, using this tool.

This is a photo I will be using later buuuut the portion of the tool under the cutter is the area you crip the connection in. When the wire is successfully crimped in you should be able to pull on it without the wire pulling out. Always do a quality control check pull.

Now put the cable in through the back of the box like the cable you removed and hook up the connections. I tested the unit after this to double check everything. When satisfied put a wire grommet in the back of the box again or whatever wire fastening bit it had in there before.

Now for safety purposes I put a rectangular bit of cardboard on either side of the wiring to prevent shorts.

Now the other end!!

open up the plug you bought.

Now do the same to this end that you did to the other. You will want to make sure the wires are not to long so they fit inside the plug. Note the ground wire (green) goes on the odd prong.

reassemble everything and enjoy!

I recently had an issue where the cable ends to my speaker cables were really noisy and even cut out sometimes when using the pa. Instead of buying all new cables I decided to get the ends and replace them.

Here are the cables.

Here are the new ends. First you will disassemble the cable ends and take note of where the wires go and where they will go on the new heads.

Now I noticed the wires looked a little burnt at the ends from being soldered to hot. The ends are soldered for a better connection to the cable end.

Basically cut a bit of the cable off, re strip and prep like in the previous tutorial and solder the ends. If you do not know how to solder see the next tutorial.

Once you have soldered the ends and re assembled they should look like this.

Alright so before we begin people can be very critical of soldering jobs. So before criticizing me I did this with a soldering pencil that holds an insane amount of heat and there is no adjustment, so be easy.

Strip the wires and prep the ends

In this tutorial I am using a joint that is meant for lengthwise strength. You basically bend the wires in a hook and interlock them. Once they are hooked together you twist them together.

Get your station set up. You will need a moist sponge to clean the soldering pencils tip. Do this when hot.

Now that you have cleaned the end of the iron I like to do what is called tinning the iron. To do this you will take the solder and touch it briefly to the end of the iron to melt a tiny bit of solder onto it. This will help with the heat transfer.

Now put some flux on the joint. I used the end of the solder to do this.

Now heat from the bottom of the wires and apply solder from the top. remember solder can be used very sparingly. Just enough to saturate the wires. No globs.

And you're done!!

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