Hark Tech
Help & troubleshooting
Honest, practical fixes for the problems we see most often in the workshop. No paywall, no sign-up — just what actually works.
Electrical
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Vintage amp hum or hiss when warm: recap symptoms
Five symptoms that mean your 1970s-90s amp needs new electrolytic capacitors, what a bench recap actually involves, and what it costs.
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Capacitor plague: spot a swollen or leaking cap
How to identify a failed electrolytic capacitor by eye and by meter, which series to distrust, and the rules for replacing them properly.
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HDMI port repair — what happens on the bench
A workshop walk-through of HDMI port repair on PS5, Xbox, laptops and TVs — failure modes, the bench process, costs, and when it's not worth doing.
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PSU faults: capacitor vs MOSFET failure
How to read the five common dead-PSU symptoms on a TV, monitor, or amp board and work out whether you're looking at a £40 fix or a write-off.
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Lead-free vs leaded solder: which to use at home
A practical look at when to reach for leaded, when lead-free is the right call, and why the workshop keeps spools of both within arm's reach.
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Soldering iron tip maintenance: triple tip life
Three rules that keep soldering iron tips alive for years instead of weeks, and the common mistakes that quietly kill them.
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ESD at the home bench: what actually matters
A sceptical look at ESD protection for hobbyist electronics repair: what damages chips, what protects them, and what's just cargo cult.
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Reading a schematic for the first time: a primer
A working hobbyist's guide to reading schematics: the ten symbols that matter, how signal flow is laid out, and how to navigate the big functional blocks.
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BGA reflow vs reball — and when each matters
A plain-English guide to the two common BGA chip repairs, what they actually do, what they cost, and the honest success rates for each.
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Lifted pad rescue with kynar wire
A lifted pad isn't a death sentence. Here's how the kynar-wire bridge repair actually works, what it costs, and when a board is genuinely beyond saving.
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When recapping won’t save your vintage gear
A recap fixes a specific class of faults in vintage audio. Spend on it when the symptoms match; don't when they don't. Here's how to tell.
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Reverse-engineering pinouts from an undocumented PCB
How we map the signal topology of a board with no public schematic, using a multimeter, a microscope, and a methodical workflow.
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Microsoldering vs through-hole: which your repair needs
A plain-English guide to working out whether your broken thing needs a £15 iron or a £3,000 microscope rig, before you contact a repair shop.
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Repasting an NVIDIA Tesla M40 — and why you should
A step-by-step walkthrough of replacing the thermal paste and pads on an NVIDIA Tesla M40 — the cheap 24 GB eBay card the local-LLM crowd are snapping up, and the first job most of them should do before running it hard.