i too had a number of repair shenanigans today. my mom who grows ever senile has developed a tendency towards mouse throwing. after she threw my last working mouse (a bluetooth laptop mouse that i liked a lot) she went all emo about not being able to play her ****ty browser games. so i decided id go to my lair on the pretense of fixing mice, just to get away from that psycho. i then rummaged through my boxes of broke junk i save for salvage and found about 4 old ps2 mice that didnt work and one optical usb mouse that had some broken clickers. after cracking open 3 of the dead ps2 mice i found one that had the same kind of click switches. i then transplanted the buttons into the pointing but not clicking usb mouse. so i took it down stairs pluged it into moms computer, yelled some obscenities, and went back up to clean up all the flecks of solder (i use lead you pbfree ****ers) strewn about my work bench.
while i was in a fix happy mood i decided to try and repair my old laser mouse that didnt hold a charge and didnt have a working right clicker (logitech needs to stop ****ing sourcing parts from china). now if there was ever a mouse they didnt want you to try to fix this was it. after removing the 4 screws needed to get the case off and disconnecting a couple wires i exposed the gooey goodness inside. the first job was to fix that dead battery. fortunately for me it was a 3.7v single cell lithum battery. i had to cut it out of its case which was ultrasonically welded in a plastic case, in the process i sliced a huge gash in my left middle finger, so i cauterized the wound with my soldering iron and continued working. i had a smaller but in better condition cell phone battery (which i salvaged from a phone someone chucked out of their car window while i was at a bus stop in juneau, free parts!) i desoldered the saftey circuitry from the old battery and attatched it to the new one, not because i dont want the mouse to melt while charging but because i wasnt sure if it would charge without it. using electrical tape and bits of the plastic casing i made a new casing for it.
next issue was a bit more involved. the pcb was a two board sandwich soldered together by a header. apparently the mouse was assembled by dropping the main board into the bottom of the case, then soldering the recharge contacts, bolting it down, and then installing and soldering the daughterboard that had the buttons i needed to swap. of course that last step meant that one of the screws that held the main board in place was in a place where it couldn't be removed. no problem, i took my dremel and from the underside drilled up under where the screw was and broke off the post (i can epoxy it later when i have epoxy), i still had to knife up the traces of the charging contacts, which was melted to the case, board comes out.
unfortunately the ****ing ****pickle engineer who designed this mouse really didnt want unqualified personnel to enter and fix the mouse. i wasnt about to desolder a 2x7 double row of headers and the angle was too funky to get my solder vacuum in there. i ended up using the heat and pull method. literally melting the switch and then removing the metal bits a piece at a time. the replacement was removed from the 3rd pcb that held the side buttons (this mouse has 4 circuit boards in it if you dont count the smd bluetooth module, damn!), i then took another button from another mouse so i could have my side button back, i didnt trust this button to be a main clicky button and wanted one i knew worked, given the difficulty neccisary to remove it. yay everything fixed just needed to put it back together. after the first attempt my clicky button wasnt clicking, aparently the switch wasnt tight aginst the psb, i just zapped it with the iron pushed it in and let it cool. second time was the charm and i now have a working lazor mouse. yay! after that i called it quits, came down and decided to type a post about it. no user serviceable parts my ass.
