What is Man?

I love JB Waterweld.  The stuff is like duct-tape for men. When I was in the Navy I used it for everything from packing and and tapping a stripped out bolt hole to fabricating parts for a biometric lock.

Yesterday I fixed a laptop for dad that had I promised to fix a while ago but just got around to doing. It still worked but dad had to prop up the power cord on something to keep upward pressure on the socket. I took the thing apart and immediately found the damage.

The top circle is the plastic socket, the bottom circle is the mount on the laptop body. The socket had grooves in it to hold it flush to the laptop body, but the flanges on the body had snapped off, leaving nothing for the grooves to slide over. Additionally, the socket connector itself was damaged.

 
Plug — Socket ——Connector — Wires

The center (hot) rod of the socket was attached to power on the back of the socket with a rivet-like flair over the power wire’s washer connector, but the flair had broken off leaving the red power wire with nothing to hold it against the back of the center socket rod. That’s why holding up the plug worked… It leveraged the little hinge under the failed center rod connecter, pushing the center rod and connector out against the red power wire. Sorry, it’s hard to explain without a better picture. The whole back of the plug was covered with another plastic cap as well.

I ended up scrapping the back cap and soldering the red power connector directly to the socket’s center rod. I then insulated the red (hot) and green (ground) wires from each other and created a cap to strengthen and protect the back of the socket with a blob of waterweld.

I went ahead and used the rest of the Waterweld to cement the socket into the laptop body. Dad’s pretty happy with it, so I’m happy too. There’s only one problem with Waterweld. When you mix it (it’s like putty) it warms up and smells like urine… and the smell is a bit hard to scrub off. Oh well.