Many
of my friends have issue with their laptop adapters (charger) including myself,
the wire of the adapter gets damaged and it does not supply the required
electric power to the laptop. Usually, we try to bend/move the adapters wire to
make it work. Sometimes it works but anyway the wire is damaged so you have to
buy a new adapter for your laptop. I was also thinking to buy a new adapter for
my laptop but then I thought I should try to repair the adapter and I repaired
it. Below is the same procedure as I did, the only difference is I repaired both
sides of the wire, the connector and the other end which connects to adapter. Procedure
shown below was posted Here
Repaired
a HP Pavilion DV6000 laptop charger cord over the weekend. The cord had
become frayed extremely bad close to the connector that plugs into the
laptop and needed to be replaced. The job was fairly easy and straightforward,
but if you don’t feel comfortable with a soldering iron/gun or electrical jobs
in general you may want to leave this to someone else. But if you aren’t
scared to try something new, and let’s face it, you don’t have much to lose at
this point if you are reading this, this can be a low-cost quick fix.
Worst possible outcome is you have to buy a new charger cord, which you were
probably already planning.
As always with any tutorial, please proceed with caution and at your own
risk, I make no guarantees. Cords can overheat, you could get electrocuted, you
could fry your laptop, etc..
Frayed
Cord
This
picture shows the bad condition of the cord, all I’ve done here was cut the
connector off. You can see how badly the outside wire is frayed. I
think the wire in the white sleeve was still intact but I had to cut all of the
bad section out to get to some clean whole wire.
Cord
Cleaned Up
I’ve
gotten the cord cleaned up and now ready to solder back to the cleaned up
connector.
Just
trim all the damaged cord out of the way, strip back the wire jacket to expose
a small amount of the center wire that will connect to the center part of the
connector. I left the outside silver wire a little longer in order to
reach further up on the side of the connector to avoid having to bend the wire
or have a kink in it. Then twisted the wire to have it all neat and
compact.
Cleaned cord w/ old connector
This picture shows the cleaned cord with the original
connector. My local radio shack store
didn’t have a new connector so I chose to clean up the original connector to
see if it would work, and it worked just fine.
I heated up the solder on the connector and the bits of broken wire came
right off. I then took a small file and
cleaned up the leftover bits to make it nice and clean.
HP Cord resoldered to Cleaned connector
Now we have the center wire in the white sleeve soldered to
the end of the connector. I put a small
piece of electrical tape around the center wire before I soldered the outside
silver wire to keep them separate. I
then clamped the connector and wire back down and soldered the outside wire to
the side of the connector. Be careful
how you hold or clamp the connector. It
could get very hot, and it could also warp or break the plastic pieces.
Finished charger cord
I reinstalled the plastic insulator boot around the soldered
connections and wrapped it tightly with electrical tape. I chose white electrical tape (since it
stands out more) as sort of a reminder to not snatch and pull on the cord as
this is a refurbished job and while it will probably hold for a long time, it
would be better not to abuse it.
We Have Power!!
Let everything cool off and sit for a few minutes and then
plug it up and see what happens.
Hopefully if everything went well, you now have power. If not, wiggle the connection around slowly
and see if anything happens, if it does come on, you may just have a loose
connection and might need to take it apart and recheck everything. If that doesn’t solve the problem, you might
have damaged the connector itself or may have bigger issues. But I hope you see a power light and the
laptop comes right back to life like my example. Good luck, it was a much cheaper fix than the
$80.00 they wanted for a new cord.
