Surface Pro 3 Charger “Repair”
The charger on my Wife’s Surface failed, it was a cheap eBay replacement so I wasn’t hugely surprised that it failed after 6 months. I ordered a replacement but to get things up and running again I decided to fiddle with the existing charger.
Here’s what I found when I removed the casing around the connector. The frayed cables had shorted and also blow the SMD fuse:
Here’s the temporary fix, I’m not proud. I was too lazy to make my way to a soldering iron and separating out the wires and shorting the fuse got the Surface charging and made my wife happy:
Here’s the medium term solution, re-soldered the wires. I’m not terribly happy with this but it’ll hold out until the new charger arrives. It seems like a poor design choice that the wires are just soldered to SMD pads not through-hole, and that the ground wire is unshielded (for the observant reader, yes the wires are opposite way round I flipped the polarity at the other end).
To provide some insulation I then stuck some heatshrink over the top, with a slit in it for the connector to poke out. That seemed to work reasonably well.
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