Back to the Aiwa Mega-CD CSD-GM1! This poor machine has suffered some pretty spectacular damage to its mainboard, with cracks running through the PCB and taking quite a few copper traces with them. Time to see whether we can put it back together again!

I’ve already repaired three damaged traces on one side of the board, including a cracked solder joint that needed a little attention. A few green wires have gone in to bridge the broken connections, and continuity is looking much better. Now I need to work my way across the rest of the damage.

One particularly nasty crack runs through several traces towards the right-hand side of the board. I’ve been following each connection with the multimeter, scraping away the coating where necessary and adding jumper wires to restore continuity. Some of the broken tracks can be repaired with solder bridges, while others need a longer wire to get around the damage.

After a fair bit of work, and a fair bit of watching The Avengers, I’ve started adding orange wires alongside the green ones. Iron Man is pretty cool, by the way. My back, on the other hand, isn’t particularly impressed with the height of this desk!

The most troublesome area involves a transistor and the connections running towards the selector switch for the radio, CD and tape functions. Several tracks were broken here, and I had to work out exactly which points belonged together before adding the repairs. It’s turning into quite a colourful collection of jumper wires.

Naturally, I also managed to wire one connection to the wrong transistor leg along the way. Thankfully I noticed the mistake while checking everything, before applying power. That could have ended rather badly!

I went back over the repaired areas with the multimeter, checking continuity and making sure the new wires weren’t connected where they shouldn’t be. There are quite a few repairs now, but things are finally starting to look promising enough for a power test.

With everything connected as carefully as I could manage, it was time to find out whether any of this had worked. No flames, please… and no flames! We’ve even got a red power light!

That’s an excellent start. It doesn’t mean the entire Aiwa is repaired, but at least the machine is showing some signs of life, and power is getting through the sections I’ve been working on. Next on the agenda is getting the speakers connected and seeing whether the radio has anything to say about all this. Progress! Little by little!

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