Lifted pad rescue with kynar wire

If you've ever read a repair quote that mentions a "lifted pad" and wondered whether your board is scrap, the short answer is usually no. A lifted pad is what happens when the small copper landing on a PCB — the bit a component leg solders to — tears away from the fibreglass substrate underneath. It exposes bare green or brown board where there should be shiny copper, and it looks, at first glance, terminal.

It isn't, most of the time. A pad is just the end of a copper trace, and copper traces can be re-routed. The standard fix is a tiny insulated jumper wire — usually kynar — soldered from a still-intact part of the trace to wherever the signal needed to go. It's slow, fiddly, and needs a microscope, but it's a routine bench job rather than a miracle.

What follows is what the repair actually involves, what tools are non-negotiable, and the conditions under which I'll tell you a board genuinely isn't worth saving.

How pads lift in the first place

Three causes account for nearly every lifted pad I see on the bench.

The first is too much heat for too long. Modern lead-free boards with HASL finish are less forgiving than the leaded boards of fifteen years ago. Hold a soldering iron on a pad at 380°C for thirty seconds and the adhesive bonding the copper to the FR4 substrate gives up. The pad comes away with the component or with the solder wick.

The second is mechanical leverage. Someone tried to yank a component — a port, a connector, a header — out of the board without fully melting all of its solder joints first. The component lifts, and the pad lifts with it. You'll often see one corner of a port shear cleanly while the rest of the joints look fine.

The third is repeated rework. Every time a pad is heated past reflow temperature, the adhesive degrades a little. By the third or fourth rework cycle, even a careful technician can lift a pad they didn't touch hard.

Cheaper boards make this worse. A single-layer surface pad with no through-hole anchor relies entirely on adhesive — once that adhesive fails, the pad is gone. Better boards use plated-through-holes that anchor the pad mechanically through the substrate; those are far more resilient but not invincible.

The kynar-wire repair

Kynar is PVDF-insulated 30 AWG wire — also sold as "wire-wrap wire". The conductor is roughly 0.25 mm across, the insulation is thermally stable enough not to retract when you bring an iron near it, and it strips cleanly with a sharp blade or hot knife. It's the standard material for this kind of work for good reason.

The repair sequence:

• Identify the broken trace's destination. Where was the signal that landed on this pad meant to go next? The schematic is the easy answer; if you don't have one, careful visual tracing with a microscope (and sometimes a multimeter on continuity) gets you there.
• Scrape the solder mask off both ends of the path with a fibreglass pen. You want bare, tinnable copper at the destination pad or via, and on the surviving stub of trace heading into the damaged area.
• Strip a tiny end of kynar, tin it, and tack it onto the destination pad with a fine-tip iron and flux.
• Route the wire flat against the board so it doesn't snag, and tack the other end onto the surviving copper of the original trace, as close to the failed pad as the copper survives.
• Repeat for every signal that used to land on the missing pad. A four-pin port with three lifted pads needs three separate kynar bridges.
• UV-cure solder mask over the repair once it's tested. This protects the bare copper from corrosion and stops the wire flexing free under thermal cycling.

Done well, the finished repair is invisible under a layer of mask and as electrically sound as the original trace.

What you need to do this well

A stereo microscope at 10-40x magnification is the only piece of kit on this list that's genuinely non-negotiable. You cannot do reliable sub-millimetre work with a magnifying lamp and a steady hand. Past that, you need a fine-tip iron (T-LB or equivalent, around 0.3 mm), good fine-point tweezers, a fibreglass scratch pen for clearing mask, a small reel of kynar, and decent no-clean flux.

Cheaper kit gets you most of the way. A £200 AmScope-clone stereo head is fine. The flux and iron tips are where corner-cutting actually shows up in the finished work.

When the board is too damaged

I do turn boards down. The honest conditions:

• Multiple lifted pads in a cluster. Usually this means a heat-damage zone — somebody sat the iron next to an HDMI port for a minute solid and cooked an area five millimetres wide. Once the substrate itself is delaminating, no amount of jumper wires fixes it.
• Lifted traces as well as pads. If the copper has torn away in a line rather than at a single landing, you're rebuilding routing rather than bridging a gap. Possible in principle, but the labour quickly exceeds the value of the device.
• Mechanically broken PCB. A cracked substrate can sometimes be epoxied and reinforced, but on thin modern boards it's usually a write-off.
• Multilayer damage with no surface access. If the broken trace runs on an inner layer of a 6- or 8-layer board, there is nothing on the surface to bridge to. Some signals can be intercepted at component pins further down the chain; many cannot.

Where it shows up in real repair work

By a comfortable margin, the most common source of lifted-pad quotes through the workshop is HDMI port replacements gone wrong. A first technician attempts the port swap, lifts two or three pads on the HDMI footprint, gives up, and the board lands here. Headphone jacks on phones, USB-C ports on laptops, and charging ports on game consoles all produce a similar 1-3 pad signature when the original attempt was rushed.

If you've had a port replacement done that "didn't work properly afterwards", lifted pads are the first thing I'd look for.

What it costs

Pad rescue is typically £40-£100 on top of the underlying repair, depending on how many pads need bridging and how complex the routing is. A single pad on a clearly visible trace is a quick job; four pads on a port with traces disappearing under a BGA is a different proposition.

I always quote the pad-rescue work separately from the underlying repair, so you can see what the microsurgery is costing versus what the original job is costing.

If you've got a board with a lifted pad — yours or somebody else's handiwork — get in touch via the soldering & board repair page and I'll take a look at photos before you ship.

See also

• HDMI port repair — what happens on the bench
• Microsoldering vs through-hole: which your repair needs
• BGA reflow vs reball — and when each matters