The Problem
It’s Christmas night and the Guitar Hero drum set has not even lasted 24 hours. My son had taken the hi-hat cymbal and twisted it around which caused the 1/8 mono audio line to completely tear. Fortunately, with only some basic tools and supplies you can quickly and easily repair your Guitar Hero drum set. My repair strategy will be to solder the audio line and then insulate the lines with some heat-shrink tubing. This repair should take only 20-30 minutes.
The problem: Here you can see the audio wire torn away from the drumset due to twisting.
If you have never soldered before, don’t let this stop you. I would say the skill level for this is beginner and if you don’t know how, to solder watch some YouTube videos on the subject. Soldering and heat shrink tubing supplies can be found at any Radio Shack.
What You Need
Basic supplies including solder iron, shrink tubing, and helping hands.
Prepare The Wires
On careful examination of 1/8 mono audio line you’ll notice that there are both inner and outer copper lines. The inner line is surrounded by a white insulation. You need to repair both lines. What you’ll want to do is with a sharp razor strip back both lines so that there is plenty of exposed copper.
Solder Inner Wire – Add Heat Shrink Tubing BEFORE Soldering
It’s hard to see in the image but I have taken two different diameter sizes of heat shrink tubing and slipped BOTH of them onto the line before soldering. The smaller in diameter size tubing will cover the inner solder repair and this will insulate the connection from the outer repair.
With the magic hands I have the inner wire ready for soldering. Hard to see, but notice that the two heat shrink tubes to the right of the exposed copper are already on.
Solder Outer Wire
Once you have soldered the inner wire and applied the inner shrink tube to insulate the line, you can now repeat these steps for the outside line.
All Done
Below is a photo of the completed project where the outer heat shrink tube has been applied over the soldered wires. The outer tube covers both the inner wire connection that already has the shrink tube on it and the outer wire connection.
The heat shrink tubing has been put on and the project is complete
