Fixing a broken sd slot on a raspberry pi

Now the raspberry pi is excellent in every way apart one, the sd card socket. The amount of people I know that suffer from this and after a chat to 4tronix about it and a kind offer to fix it for me I thought what could go wrong?

My first step was to use a pair of electrical/jewellery plier cutters to cut the 15 connections, once this was carefully done I was left with this.

Next up was to desolder, now never used desolder wick before, but what experience I have had of desoldering wasn't a happy one.

So what I had to do was place the thin wick over each soldered area one bit at a time, placing the solder tip on top using the heat to heat up the desolder wick so that it would get hot enough to melt the solder and absorb it.

With the new sd card holder bought off eBay ready, I was left with this nice clean solder free board.

Ok there's a bit of solder left on a couple of connections, but very little. 

Next up was to carefully hold the sd card in place with all connectors touching the correct spot on the raspberry pi, now soldering one connector in one end, I then start the other end ensuring the solder covers the motherboard connection along with the connector.

So far this has taken about 15 minutes for first attempt, although not happy with two of the connections it works, by not happy the solder connects the card in/out sensor switch but a bit bumpy.

Leaving the pi for a few minutes I come back to it for another look using a magnifying glass and all seems fine.

Now for the final stage to try it out, plugging in the sd card all seems fine, good fit and sd slot stays intact.

Firing the pi up and bingo, it starts loading and while I type up this blog it's doing a sudo apt-get update.

And that's it a working pi again all for around three uk pounds in total, certainly cheaper than a new £25 pi.