Plainwire
A small repair wiki. Every page here describes a fix that one of us has actually done, on a device we actually own, with the tool we actually used rather than the one the service manual specifies. Where we are guessing we say so in the text.
We are not a forum, a shop or a parts supplier, and there is nothing to sign up for. If a guide saves you a repair, that is the entire point of it.
Guides
Getting a swollen pouch cell out of a laptop that was designed not to let you. Adhesive, isopropyl, and why heat is usually the wrong answer.
The steam channel, the bimetallic disc, and the four-pound part that fixes about seventy per cent of these.
Reflowing a headphone socket whose pads have lifted, on a two-layer board, with an iron rather than hot air.
Diagnosing a machine that fills and washes but will not empty, before you buy a pump you may not need.
Flicker, dead strings and the electrolytic capacitor that is almost always the culprit in cheap constant-current drivers.
Recently revised
| Page | Revised | Rev | Editor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kettle will not switch off | 2026-08-11 | 9 | hexnut |
| Screw heads and drivers | 2026-06-30 | 14 | bramble |
| Washer drain pump | 2026-05-04 | 6 | t.orme |
| Glued clamshell battery | 2026-03-19 | 11 | hexnut |
| The eleven-tool kit | 2026-01-22 | 8 | larkspur |
| Solder alloys and flux | 2025-11-08 | 5 | bramble |
| Desk lamp LED driver | 2025-09-27 | 3 | larkspur |
| Cracked 3.5 mm jack | 2025-04-02 | 7 | t.orme |
Before you open anything
Several guides here touch equipment that plugs into the wall. Unplug it. Not switched off at the socket — unplugged, with the plug where you can see it. If a guide involves a capacitor large enough to hold a charge, the guide says so and tells you how to discharge it. If you are not confident, a competent local repairer is cheaper than an incident.
We also decline to publish some repairs. Anything behind a sealed lithium pack with no service access, anything requiring the mains side of a switched-mode supply to be live while probed, and anything on a gas appliance. Those are not gaps we intend to fill.
How the wiki is organised
Guides are procedures with an outcome. Reference pages are lookup tables that several guides point at, so that a screw specification lives in one place and gets corrected once. If you find the same fact stated in two places, that is a bug — tell us and one of them will become a link.
Plainwire is written and maintained by volunteers. Text on this site may be reused and adapted with attribution under a share-alike licence; photographs and diagrams belong to whoever made them and are marked accordingly. No advertising, no trackers, no accounts.