Repairs We’ve Actually Done
Every repair shop says it fixes hard things. This page is the evidence: sixteen jobs from the workshop’s own records, with the job numbers — including four that did not end in a repair.
They are here because these are the jobs that decide whether a shop is worth bringing something to. A screen replacement is a screen replacement anywhere. A dead board with a decade of photographs on it is not.
Customer names are not published — people brought us their devices, not their permission to be advertising. Everything else is as it happened.
Board-Level Repair
Microsoldering, hot air rework and diagnosis under a microscope. When the fault is on the board itself there is no part to swap, which is where most repair shops stop.
A dead creative workstation, traced to one chip
The laptop would not power up at all. Diagnosis put the fault on the power controller feeding the graphics chip — a component that is not stocked in this country and had to be brought in from overseas, on a lead time of about two weeks.
Two things were said before anything was ordered. First, that the wait was real and not something we could shorten. Second, that on a fault like this the outcome is genuinely uncertain, so the work was quoted as a fixed attempt fee rather than a promise — you know what it costs to find out, and you decide.
The chip went on after the New Year. Then several hours of stress testing before anyone was told it was ready, because a graphics power rail that fails under load is a laptop that comes straight back.
A burnt track on the board, rebuilt by hand
A capacitor and a resistor had gone, and the damage had taken a section of copper trace with it. A trace is not a component you can order — where it has burnt away the connection has to be rebuilt on the board, under magnification, and then proved to carry what it is supposed to carry.
The customer also wanted the display sorted, so a tested used 4K touch panel went in at the same time. Total £600 including delivery, less the £128 already paid at booking.
A known fault, found and replaced in a day
One burnt resistor. It is a familiar failure on this generation of Surface Pro, and when it is that and nothing else, the repair is quick — find it, replace it, test it.
The display had to come off to reach the board, as it does on every Surface, and it was re-bonded and returned the next day. Two hundred pounds against a device that had been written off.
One capacitor between a laptop and the bin
It arrived dead. £35 for the diagnostic, which found a failed capacitor; £100 to replace it and prove the machine stable.
The customer collected it the following day and said he had not expected it back that fast. Neither had we, and we do not promise it — but when a board fault turns out to be one component and the component is on the shelf, this is what it looks like.
Face ID rebuilt, then tested for a weekend
Board-level work brought the phone back up, and Face ID was repaired with it — which on this generation is not a module you swap, because the components are paired to the board at the factory.
The part worth knowing is what happened afterwards: the phone spent the weekend on test with one of our own SIM cards in it before anyone said it was ready. An intermittent fault that only shows up on the second day is still a fault.
Components missing from the board, put back
The board was missing components. Not corroded, not cracked — missing, which usually means somebody has been in there already and things came off during an earlier attempt.
Every one of them was identified and resoldered, and the phone worked without fault afterwards.
Data Recovery
On a modern phone the storage is soldered to the board, so recovery is not a matter of taking a drive out and reading it. It is component work — and it is where a device that is not worth repairing can still be worth opening.
The phone was finished. The photographs were not.
It came in with a screen that had stopped registering touch, and the owner was clear from the start that the priority was the data rather than the handset — and said what that was worth to him before we quoted.
The fault was under the screen, on the logic board. An iPhone XS board is two boards soldered face to face, and the storage sits on the upper layer. Reaching it means separating the two under hot air without cooking anything on either side, then transplanting the layer that matters onto a donor board so the phone can be brought up long enough to be read.
It came up. Everything came off it.
Photographs read straight off the memory chip
The phone would not start and nothing on the board was going to change that. So the route was chip-off: the NAND memory comes off the board entirely, is reballed, and is read directly with a hardware programmer — in this case an easyJTAG rig — bypassing the phone altogether.
It is slow, it is not always possible, and it ends the phone. Which is why it is quoted as what it is: a recovery job, not a repair. The photographs and video came back. £25 for the diagnostic; the recovery quoted after, once we knew what we were dealing with.
Laptops, Desktops and Everything Else
Not every job needs a microscope. These are the ones where the difference was a straight answer and a part that arrived when we said it would.
Board replaced and running the same day
The motherboard was dead. A replacement was sourced for around £100 and fitted, which on a desktop of this age is the sensible economics — the processor, the memory and the graphics card were all fine.
A board swap on Windows means a reinstall, so that was done too, and a new cooling setup went in while the machine was open. Finished the same day.
A board swap, and then the real problem
The board and fan swap was the easy part. Once the machine was assembled it turned out the customer’s own SSD was carrying a Windows install that crashed on boot — so the laptop was still not usable, and the original fault had nothing to do with it.
Rather than hand it back half-solved, the data was copied off onto one of our drives, Windows was installed clean, and everything went back. This is the part of a repair that appears on no price list.
Corrosion cleaned off the board
Liquid gets into a laptop and keeps working on it long after the spill. What was left was corrosion across the board, which is cleaned rather than replaced — ultrasonic first, then component by component under magnification for anything the corrosion had eaten through.
The machine came back to full working order, fan included, and was collected after four days.
A snapped arm on a current drone
The front right arm was broken. On a folding drone that is a structural part carrying a motor and its wiring, so it is a strip-down rather than a clip-on replacement.
The part arrived within a few days, Adam fitted it, and the owner tested the drone at the counter before taking it away. That is always the better way round — fly it in front of us, not on the way home.
When We Said No
Four jobs that did not end in a repair. They are here deliberately: a shop that publishes only its wins is telling you what it would like you to think. What we promise is that you hear the bad news early and are not charged for work that did not help you.
The fault that kept coming back
A burnt resistor and a diode were replaced and the tablet powered up — on mains. On battery it would not run, and the same component failed again. Then again.
When one part keeps dying, the part is not the fault; something upstream is taking it out. Chasing that on a Surface Pro 4 would have cost more than the tablet is worth, and saying so is cheaper for everyone than another attempt. The customer paid the £39 diagnostic and nothing else.
Too much had already been done to it
The board arrived with components missing, solder marks around the connectors and a capacitor somebody had taken off. It had been worked on before, and not carefully.
Adam’s assessment was that the accumulated damage put it beyond a repair we would be willing to warrant. That was explained at the counter with the board in front of the customer, which is the only honest way to deliver it. Diagnostics were £35 and non-refundable, which had been said upfront.
The donor board that did not exist
Recovery by swapping a drive’s controller board depends on finding a genuinely matching donor — same model, same revision — and then moving the original BIOS chip across, because the drive’s calibration data lives on it.
Weeks went into finding one: specialist suppliers, marketplaces, direct approaches to sellers overseas. The board that eventually arrived was not a match. The BIOS chip was transplanted anyway and the drive still did not come up.
There was no correct board on the market at any price. We said that, closed the job, and did not pretend another attempt would change it.
We could not make it stick, so we paid it back
A no-backlight fault, which is a board repair: the capacitors, the coil, the diode and the backlight IC in that circuit were all replaced.
The phone came back more than once. On the last attempt a leg lifted from the integrated circuit and the board stopped cooperating altogether. At that point it was ours, not the customer’s problem.
The full £110 was refunded and we kept the handset. It is the least comfortable case on this page and the reason it is here: this is what a warranty means when the repair is the thing that failed.
Bring Us the One Nobody Else Would Take
If your device is on this page in spirit — already turned away somewhere, or worth less than the repair but carrying something that is not replaceable — that is the work the workshop is set up for.
Diagnostics is £39, paid upfront and credited in full against the repair. If it turns out to be beyond economical repair, the fee covers the work of finding that out and you hear it straight.