I received a call from a customer asking if I work on Beats headphones, he needed someone to solder a couple spots. Customer brought these in (pic below) already disassembled.
Turns out one of the tabs was broken and in order to install a new one you have to desolder the entire wiring harness on one side in order to slide the new tab in.
There’s a few JST connectors leading to one of the boards. I marked them with one, two and no dots for an easy reminder. Which I don’t have a picture of. On the piece with the driver there a total of seven (7) wires which need to be desoldered in order to be able to disconnect the harness from the drive piece. There’s five on the left side of the board and two on the right.
The order from left to right is: gold, green, black, blue, red. And on the right side is: long red, long gold/blue twisted.
After the harness was released from the driver piece, I pulled the harness through all the other holes. To get the little JST connectors out, I just pinched them to one side (carefully!) and fit them through horizontally. It almost looked like the wires were super glued (yuck) to the side of the driver piece. I had to be very careful as they were ~50 gauge wire (joking) and they frayed very easily.
There’s a isolating glue type substance on the solder pads for the wires. I used the soldering iron to heat it up and it came off relatively easy. I had to be careful as the wires tended to end up in the tip of my tweezers with the glue substance.
Overall, this repair was a little time consuming to remove the harness and resolder the wires. It was more leg work in assembly than soldering.