Les Bonnes Choses

Ever take a look at the prong on a headphone jack? Ever wonder why it's shaped the way it is? Ever wonder what would happen if the tip broke off in your portable audio player? I found the answer to these questions and more over the last week.

Jude has an mp3 player. It's a fun little thing that drains batteries like the Nosferatu drain necks, but it's far easier to load it up with tolerable kid tunes than to fumble around with a book of CDs. The idea was to pipe Jude's music through the car using a cord that has a TRS connector at either end, with one end plugged into the headphone jack, and the other end plugged into the auxiliary input jack in the car. We're going to have to listen to it anyways, so we may as well let him at the controls and give him something to do. It worked fine for a couple of trips before the sound stopped coming through the car speakers. An examination of the cord revealed the cause: the tip of one of the prongs had broken off, presumably inside the headphone jack of the mp3 player. I resolved to fix the problem by removing the headphone jack and dislodging the broken off nib, only to make the problem worse when I irreparably damaged the internals of the mp3 player when I took it apart.

Total: $30 for a new mp3 player, plus replacing the broken end of the cord.

I discovered today to my great consternation that the nib had in fact broken off inside the auxiliary port in the car (so I wrecked Jude's mp3 player for no reason). I may have said something that, from a distance might have sounded like "another sucker". Despite being between the two bumpers, I had serious doubts that something lodged in there would be covered by the bumper-to-bumper warranty and dealer repairs would probably run a few hundred dollars. Despite last week's electronics mishap, I was sufficiently emboldened to remove the jack myself, and was met with success. I brought it to the dealership and showed it to the parts guy who ordered one in. For some reason the part is on back order (which makes me wonder how common this problem is) and was going to cost me $60 (running total of $90 so far). Figuring that there's no way I can make the problem worse, I made it my project this evening to disassemble the jack and remove the nib. Not only did I get to practice soldering, but I was able to remove the nib from the jack and reinstall it. I also found another cable laying around that I used to verify that I had indeed fixed the problem. On one hand, I could say that I had saved $60. On the other hand, I spent about 3 hours fiddling around with that stupid jack today, so at a bargain wage of $20/hr I just broke even.