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I've made a big little mistake... (soldering question)

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awn2000

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I'm writing here because, although I didn't see my question answered elsewhere in the forum, this seemed like a great community of informed and helpful folks. So here goes: I am trying to repair my Sansa e260 4 gb mp3 player. The headphone jack was only playing out one ear, and even then it was cutting in and out. I opened up the player, found a explanation of how to fix the problem, and went about trying to solder the headphone jack's pins back into place. HOWEVER, one of the pins would not stick to the board, and being new to soldering, I pretty much just tried to solder it harder. At one point, I was trying to clean existing solder off the place I was having problems, and the location got singed a bit. Now I can't get any signal from that point at all. It is a little black, but the damage is localized to the small area the headphone attaches. Did I irreparably damage the board, or can I clean it off or scrape away some of the burn. The device still powers up, just no signal from one headphone. I don't want to do any more damage than I already have :( If worse comes to worst, I'll just buy a broken one off ebay with a cracked screen or something and combine them into a single working mp3 player. Any help is appreciated, thanks!
 
If its blackend you most likely burned the copper circuit trace right off the board. the copper traces are what the solder sticks to. If you did burn it off there is no real going back. If you can find the place in the circuit that the signal came form you may get lucky and be able to put a jumper wire in to get the signal over to where you need it.
 
Thanks for your reply. So, if I were to try the jumper cable route... how exactly might I go about that? Just try to trace where the signal might go and then... solder a small cable between the two points? Sorry to be such a noob about this- my electronics courses were by far the weakest link in my education!
 
You need to use a small temperature controlled soldering iron. Your cheap soldering iron gets too hot and burns the glue and the copper traces fall off.
 
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awn2000, post some high resolution well focused images of the area you were working in. It's not too likely that you're going to be able to recover the board at this point, if you actually scorched part of the board you probably heated nearby components to the point where their values changed to make the circuit unusable, or damaged IC's especially on a surface mount board
 
If your board is to be salvaged, it should be attempted by someone with a good set of tools, a fair amount of time, and a lot of experience. Post your approximate location and maybe someone can volunteer.
 
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