I bought this 6 or 7 years ago knowing that it was broken, thinking i can fix it at some point. I know these things are a bit hart to find so I figured a broken one is better than not having one.
After unwrapping it I did notice that the shell is in really good shape, that’s a plus. But, I noticed a yellow wire sticking out from the bottom of the shell.
Once opened I seen a few problems. First off the power wires from the battery tray are taped together. Looks like a pretty bad hack job. Then I noticed the yellow wires are soldered (not very well) to some pins on the PCB where the LCD ribbon cable connector was. It must have broke/ripped off and someone tried to do a hack job. I noticed that the LCD ribbon cable is also cut.
After I removed the PCB from the shell I noticed there was a capacitor that was wired off board in what looks like to be one of the capacitors in the audio path. It must have had audio problems and was “repaired”.
What have I done so far:
I desoldered the yellow wires and noticed there was 2 pads that the LCD header was. I bet the 2 pads were lifted when it broke off. So now I need to do some simple continuity test to see if I can pick up the traces from somewhere else.