I bought this 3ds going off one picture, and while the exterior looks fantastic, it unfortunately had been heavily water damaged.
There was rust behind the top screen lens, the joystick was super gritty, the volume slider didn’t work, the home, X, and B buttons didn’t work, and the battery needed replacing. Opening the device, there was a Ton of rust all in it, the frame of the bottom screen was completely rusty, several areas on the motherboard was rusted, and all the buttons felt gritty.
– Disassembled the entire device, and did my best to clean up all the rust, and ran everything through an ultrasonic cleaner.
– New ABYX dome sticker
– Painted over all the rust areas with a paint-pen to hopefully limit further rust dust
– New glass top lens
– new volume slider
– Soldered the broken Home button connector to the MB.
– New battery
– rewired one of the speakers that was rust damaged
– Replaced and lubed the new joystick
– Replaced the stock charger with a usb-c charger port.
It actually turned out a ton better than I was expecting it would, it went from a parts device to playable.
The only thing I didn’t do, was replace the bottom screen, the bottom corner has deep yellowing due to water damage and the rust, and the touch screen is very scratched up. A new screen runs about $40, and I’ve already put more into it than its worth, and some of the soldering repairs I had to do on the motherboard would make disassembling it again pretty risky. A bit of a shame, as the shell and exterior are all in really great shape. ( no peeling or deep scratches )
overall I’m happy with how it turned out, and honestly came out a bit better than I expected. I was sure the rust behind the lens wasn’t going to clean up as well as it did, and fixing the broken buttons and connectors was a coin-flip.
I’m probably going to just sell it for cheap to someone who wants a functioning unit and doens’t mind the cosmetic issues.
3 Comments
How do you fix water damages ?
Nicely done 👌
I bought this 3ds going off one picture, and while the exterior looks fantastic, it unfortunately had been heavily water damaged.
There was rust behind the top screen lens, the joystick was super gritty, the volume slider didn’t work, the home, X, and B buttons didn’t work, and the battery needed replacing. Opening the device, there was a Ton of rust all in it, the frame of the bottom screen was completely rusty, several areas on the motherboard was rusted, and all the buttons felt gritty.
– Disassembled the entire device, and did my best to clean up all the rust, and ran everything through an ultrasonic cleaner.
– New ABYX dome sticker
– Painted over all the rust areas with a paint-pen to hopefully limit further rust dust
– New glass top lens
– new volume slider
– Soldered the broken Home button connector to the MB.
– New battery
– rewired one of the speakers that was rust damaged
– Replaced and lubed the new joystick
– Replaced the stock charger with a usb-c charger port.
It actually turned out a ton better than I was expecting it would, it went from a parts device to playable.
The only thing I didn’t do, was replace the bottom screen, the bottom corner has deep yellowing due to water damage and the rust, and the touch screen is very scratched up. A new screen runs about $40, and I’ve already put more into it than its worth, and some of the soldering repairs I had to do on the motherboard would make disassembling it again pretty risky. A bit of a shame, as the shell and exterior are all in really great shape. ( no peeling or deep scratches )
overall I’m happy with how it turned out, and honestly came out a bit better than I expected. I was sure the rust behind the lens wasn’t going to clean up as well as it did, and fixing the broken buttons and connectors was a coin-flip.
I’m probably going to just sell it for cheap to someone who wants a functioning unit and doens’t mind the cosmetic issues.