Electronics repair & custom builds
Board-level soldering, and devices that don't exist until we build them
Plenty of shops will tell you board-level work isn't worth doing. We have a full rework bench and the hands to use it — from re-soldering a snapped cable to surface-mount and BGA work — and if the thing you need doesn't exist, we can design and build it.
Sound familiar?
- Broken plugs, ports, sockets and cables
- A board that needs component-level fault-finding
- Surface-mount (SMD) or BGA rework, including reflows
- A snapped USB stick with your files on it
- Something old or irreplaceable that's stopped working
- A device you need that nobody sells
Pricing
USB stick port repair
From $79The classic — snapped clean off, files still on the board. From $79 for basic solder work; more where board tracks need repairing. Somehow it's always a school teacher's.
Everything else
Quoted after diagnosisDiagnosis is charged, and it buys you a straight answer: what's wrong, what it costs to fix, and whether it's worth fixing at all.
What the work looks like
Book it in at either store
The advanced bench work — the soldering, the rework, the custom builds — happens at Victoria Point, because that's where the owner's bench is and he does most of it himself. But Alexandra Hills books these jobs in and hands them back all the time: drop off and pick up at whichever store suits you, and the job makes the trip instead of you.
Not just cables
Basic soldering — plugs, ports, broken joints, custom cables — is the everyday stuff. The bench also handles the work most shops send away or turn away: surface-mount component replacement, reflows, and BGA rework. If it has a circuit board, it's probably fixable here.
The work other shops send to a specialist — we're that specialist
Most repair shops don't attempt board-level micro-soldering at all — it's not a failure on their part, it just needs a different bench: a microscope, the right iron, and someone trained on it. So when a job needs it, they refer it out. We're one of the places that referral goes. A recent example: an FPC connector replacement on a Samsung phone mainboard — one of the tiny sockets the flexible ribbon cables clip into, a few millimetres across — after three other phone shops had already passed it on elsewhere. It came to our bench and went home working. If somewhere else has told you they can't do a repair, ask if they know someone who can. There's a good chance it's us.
Custom electronics, designed and built
Need a device that doesn't exist? We design and build one-off electronics around Arduino, Raspberry Pi and ESP32 — with colour touchscreens, menus, sensors, whatever the job calls for. Solving a real need with a purpose-built device is genuinely the owner's favourite kind of job, so bring us the problem rather than a spec: describing what you want it to do is enough to start.
A straight answer before any money changes hands
Diagnosis is charged, and here's the deal that comes with it: if we can't fix it, it can't be fixed — or it isn't economical to. When a repair costs more than a replacement, we'll tell you so and advise against the job, even though that talks us out of work. We'd rather you trust the next quote.
When it's priceless rather than valuable
Some things fail the economics test and still deserve fixing. A recent favourite: an animated Christmas decoration — characters, music, the lot — that had belonged to a customer's late mother, direct-wired for 110V with half its motors gone. It got a full AC-to-DC conversion, new motors and new lights, and it runs again every December. On paper it wasn't worth the cost. It was worth every cent. If something matters to you, we'll give you the real price and let you make that call — no judgement either way.