Unlocking a ST310014ACE - Step 5

I got each end of the CD audio cable plugs trimmed and I banded them together with a couple of my hair thingies. It plugs in nicely to the hard drive port.

Then I cut the wire in the middle and found out that only two wires are inside besides the stranded ground wires. I was hoping that all four wires which I can see going into the connectors would be there. So, I'll have to splice onto the black wires up by the plug. Grrr.

I then worked on de-soldering the chips from the old serial card and that was a dismal failure. I finally had to cut the chips out and then cut the board between each pair of pins. (I inserted a metal blade between the board and the chip so the saw couldn't cut into the IC.) This let me heat the solder and pry up one side at a time. The next picture shows the cuts I've made and I took another picture with it upside down to better show the chip itself.

And finally, I have one of the chips off and soldered onto the new board. I did break the fine part of pin 7, so I soldered a copper wire to it and since that is a ground pin, I ran it to two more places for later use when I solder the audio cable wires to the board to use as the connection to the hard drive.

I've already cut the board for the second chip. (That's the one in the pictures above.) So I'm ready to de-solder the second chip.  I know it will go fine cause I've got experience now. :)

EDIT (5:31 pm)

It's much later in the day and here's a picture showing where I have removed three of the partial pieces of the printed circuit board from the other IC.

In the next picture, there is just one little piece left.

Yay! All the little pieces of circuit board are off of the second chip.

After straightening the pins, I've inserted the chip into the new board. This picture shows the board right side up with the '88 chip on the left and the '89A on the right to match my circuit layout drawing. Since I've angled the board you can see the copper wire I added to the ground pin of the line receivers chip.

Then I went back to the data cable and cut loose the black wires.

I spliced on some new wire to each of the black wires and soldered them to make a good connection.

Here we see that I've used electrical tape to wrap up the exposed wires. (I taped each splice separately, then each 4 wire set.) I also taped a piece of blue paper on top to indicate which side is up.

And here is the data cable plugged into the communications port of the hard drive.

On the other end of this cable I've stripped back the insulation getting ready to solder each wire to where it needs to go on the circuit board.

I'll need to solder the two data and one ground wire to the DB9 connector and tie the appropriate pins together. For now I have more chores to take care of and I hope to work on this again later on.