I tried again last night and it went a little better than it had previously. I switched to the big nozzle and tried to preheat the board a bit, and messed around bit more with the air speed and temperature. It was still tough and took more effort than I expected. I guess in a lot of ways this is a practice thing.

I don't think anything is glued on (not that I'm dealing with anyway). FWIW, I'm using Weller silver solder, and I think the leaded stuff I have is kester (i'd have to pull it out). I [I]think [/I]the MBA I'm working on would use lead-free, but it is a 2015 era, so I don't...

Are we talking about injecting voltage or through the normal power input?...

Allright, I successfully got the fuse off (It was a struggle. All the youtubers make Hot air look like a cakewalk) and attempted to inject power (1V 5A from my Benchtop Power supply) and did not have any success. According to the PSU, it was drawing no current. I felt around the tantalum capacitors, searching for one that was heating up, but didn't find anything specific.

To be clear, I had my ground wire attached to a screw hole (easy to access ground) and the voltage wire on the PPBUS_G3H pin of the fuse footprint.



What can I look for next?...

I'm trying to fix a broken MacBook Air, and got a parts board to salvage components from. Following the suggestions of many folks here, I wanted to get in a little practice of using my hot air station (A Quick 957DW+) on the parts board so I know what kind of behavior to expect.

For the life of me, I can't get anything done with this thing. I have tried multiple temperatures (from 210-425c), different air speeds, preheating the board (with the hot air, just warming it all around). I have applied what feels like excessive amounts of flux (Amtech V2-TF-559) and the solder on these components...

This made me look at the Tantalum caps around the board to see if any of them were obviously blown or having trouble. They look okay, but I did notice some corrosion under the microscope that I hadn't seen before around C7140, C141, and C7143. I'll get out my hot air gun this weekend and take off the fuse as you suggest and see if that provides further clues.

I've got a parts board on the way to help me replace bad components.

And thank you!...

Thank you, that was very helpful.

Either side of the fuse resulted in 0.3Ohm - it looks like it not blown....

I'm not particularly confident about these measurements. With a probe on ground (The shielding on the magsafe connector) and the other probe on either side of the fuse, I get the following readings:
PPBUS_G3H: ~3MOhm
PPVBAT_G3H_CHGR_REG: ~35KOhm.

However, in both cases the values roll up and down - I was really not able to get a reliable reading there. This makes me think I totally misunderstood what you were asking for - or the appropriate way to do it.
For what it's worth, the resistance on the fuse is negligible, but not infinite, making me think that it's still...

Hi everyone,

I have a MacBook Air 2015 (820-00165-02) that had some liquid damage. It was working for a while only on Adapter power, but that stopped working. Thunderbolt (external display) did not work. There was a bit of corrosion on the board, and I've cleaned that up. The adapter light does not turn on when I plug it in.

PP3v42_G3H: 3.42V
PPBUS_G3H: 0V
PPDCIN_G3H: 16.4V
PPDCIN_G3H_INRUSH: 0V
​
A lot of this is new to me, but following the schematic, I think that Q7180 is not producing the PPDCIN_G3H_INRUSH voltage, which in turn drives...

Hello Everyone,

I'm hopping on here because I have a 2015 Macbook Air that took some liquid damage, so I'm trying to figure out how to revive it.
Other than computers, I'm an electronics enthusiast and work as a robotics software engineer.

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi, I'm Aaron. I'm a software engineer by trade, and joined this forum because I'm trying to fix a MacBook Air that I inherited. Additionally, I think board repair is kind of cool, and a good way to keep electronics out of landfills.