Editing Maintenance/Mouse button replacement (section)

== What could possibly go wrong? ==
The old switches need to be desoldered but the geometry of a four-legged chip is slightly annoying.  I believe that the right tool to lift both legs on one side or all four legs at once would have been a two-headed iron like soldering tweezers, or a rework station with a hot air gun.  Desoldering the legs one at a time with the regular soldering iron is hard to do.  I turned to the infinitely versatile metal thumbtack to apply some pressure to the switch body as I heated up each pad in turn.

In hindsight, the main lesson I relearned is that coffee mixes poorly with fine motor tasks.  My hands were trembling like leaves in wind, and I probably used ten times the force that I should have when pushing the thumbtack under the switch.  I also should have pried only at the legs and not at the body of the switch itself, if possible.

What I'm trying to get around to telling you, gentle reader, is that I tore away half of the important little electrical traces during this step.

Here are some photos of the damage:
[[File:Old_and_torn_microswitches.jpg|thumb|Removing the microswitches has wounded their host.]]
[[File:Mouse_switch_board_with_missing_traces.jpg|thumb|There should be no bare circuit board visible, this is where the electrical traces were torn away.|left]]
It's similar to discovering that bits of a placenta are missing after birth: inspect everything that came out, if it's intact then you're probably good.  If something is missing then assume it's going be a serious problem and don't continue without finding out exactly what went wrong.
[[File:Microswitch_internal_circuit.png|thumb|Internal schematic for a microswitch]]
Nonetheless, I thought I would try to finish the replacement as planned.

After all, the internal wiring for these switches has the left and right pads tied together internally so it's possible that we only needed one pad conducting the signal and the other had no traces anyway, it's purely there for mechanical attachment.  This could also explain why the same pads tore away on both switches?

The new switches went in without too much fuss.

I should mention at this point that I'm a complete hack—an unlicensed hobbyist.  I was let go from a summer job working for a hardware video artist at which I made 10,000 solder connections, decades ago.  Honestly, flashbacks from this experience came to me against my wishes, singeing my conscience with a cloud of lead smoke as I sweat over the two small switches.

Okay but it went uneventfully and here is the result, notice the handsome new slate-gray nubs.
[[File:Mouse with new microswitches.jpg|thumb|New mouse same as the old mouse|left]]
There was a slight height difference between the old and new switches, so I prepared to shave down the plastic step which does the internal pressing.  The mechanical clickiness felt great.
[[File:Two types of microswitch.jpg|thumb|Side view of old (left) and new (right) switches]]However, this is where the story takes a sad turn: there was no signal sent from either button.  They are dead to the computer, and a multimeter confirms nothing is happening on the board.

This is the point at which my photographer suddenly gets distracted by the pretty trees outside of our window and mercifully snaps a few photos of that, instead of zooming in on my fallen expression and the tears running down my cheeks, as a more seasoned journalist might have done.
[[File:Trees outside a window.jpg|thumb|All is not lost—hey, look at these trees!]]

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