"My router mod" or "How I plan to electrocute myself and burn down my house" Part 3

If you've made it here to part 3: congratulations. You are the first person to ever have read this far. Most people doze off or start drinking heavily near the beginning of part 2 and never quite make it to that "next post" button. But not you. You stuck with it. Now you're on the last leg of this marathon tale and I wish you the best as you strive toward the finish. Unfortunately when you get there, you'll probably just wish you'd given up back with all the drinkers and narcoleptics. Oh well, live and learn.

I took apart the router, which was surprisingly easy. It was kind of disappointing really. Just 4 Phillips screws and a piece of adhesive across the front bezel was holding the two halves together. No screws with weird special-order heads (triangle, star, etc.), no parts that fall off as soon as you open the case and you have no idea where they go, not even any of those sneaky little plastic tabs that you're sure to snap off when you try to release them. You know, all those little booby traps that let us know that manufacturers are serious about all that warranty voiding nonsense. Just, imagine if Indiana Jones had taken that golden head off the pedestal in Raiders of the Lost Ark and ... nothing. No arrows, no boulder, nothing. It was just anti-climactic is all I'm saying.

After looking around and taking some pictures of the innards, I set to work. I decided to use a hole saw to make the hole for the fan. I didn't have one the right size so I had to borrow one from my Dad (Hi Dad! Look, I'm on the Internet!). I didn't want to accidentally drill a hole through my table, so I held the top of the router case in my left hand and used my right hand to drill the hole. I carefully positioned the drill so that when it had cut through the case, my left palm would be there to catch the tip of the drill bit (safety first!). Luckily I managed to get the hole drilled without impaling any of my appendages. After that I drilled 4 pilot holes for the fan screws.

Now I needed to figure out where to solder the fan wires to the router. I could see the 3 solder points on the under side of the mainboard that were connected to the power connector. However, I couldn't figure out: (A) Why there were 3 instead of just two, and (B) which was positive and which was negative. I decided that "eeny-meeny-miney-moe" wasn't the best approach to figure this out and the tongue trick that you use to see if 9 volt batteries are dead didn't really seem like it would be too helpful here either. So, I went out and bought an electrical multi-meter. I used the "continuity test" (which just tells you if 2 points are electrically connected) to find out which solder point was connected to the pin on the power plug and which was connected to the barrel. Oddly enough, 2 of the 3 solder points are connected to the barrel (maybe "eeny-meeny-miney-moe" has a role to be played in this project after all). After that, it was just a matter of looking at the sticker on the power brick which tells you the polarity of the pin and barrel.

Now I was ready to solder the fan wires to the correct solder points on the mainboard. I realized that I was going to need 3 hands for this part of the project and since I don't have 3 hands (hey shut up! that thing growing out of my back is technically a flipper, not a hand!) or cool robots like Tony Stark, I decided to ask my lovely and charming wife for assistance. After some grumbling about wanting no part of my misguided project, I was able to "convince" her (i.e. whine about it till she agreed to do it just to shut me up) to help.

I'm going to go ahead and say I did an awesome job at soldering the wires to the mainboard. You can look at the pictures of the project I'll be posting soon and you can draw whatever conclusion you'd like. Just keep your opinion to yourself though. You wouldn't want to damage my fragile ego would you? :-D

After I completed soldering the wires, I realized I had just done something very stupid. I had not fed the wires through the hole I had drilled in the case... great... So I now had a choice. I could (A) admit my mistake, unsolder the wires, feed them through the hole, and solder them back, or (B) pretend like I did it on purpose, cut the wires in the middle, feed the wires through the case, and then solder the wires together where I had cut them. That way I could tell everybody I did it so if I ever needed to swap fans, I could do it without opening the router again. I, of course, chose option B. However, my dreams of salvaging my mistake were short-lived. After I cut the wires, I immediately set to work soldering them back together, once again forgetting to feed them trough the hole........
I hate me sometimes.......

I would also like to mention here that my wife later told me that she noticed the mistake before I started soldering the wires back together, but didn't say anything because she thought it would be funnier to let me realize what I had done after the fact. What a nice girl she is...

Back to the story. For those of you counting, the score is:
Solder: 2
Joelslaw: 0
But the 3rd times a charm as they say, and I was finally able to bring my problem solving skills up to the level of a trained chimp and get the wires through the hole this time. I soldered them back together and put a piece of electrical tape around each one.

After the soldering fiasco, the rest of the project was cake. I tucked the wires away, screwed Fat Fan McGee to the outside of the case, and put the 2 halves of the case back together.

Now the moment of truth... 3... 2... 1... Yay! I'm still alive!!!

My wife sighed relief and put away the fire extinguisher and broom handle she'd been holding. I moved my newly modded router back to the "nerd cave"(the aptly named dark, hot, and moist half room, hidden under the staircase where my wife forces me to keep all my unsightly gadgets and fake musical instruments with colorful buttons.) and hooked it all up.

That was 5 days ago and so far so good. I can tell a huge difference in the temperature of the router. It's no longer hot to the touch, in fact it is only slightly warm. Only time will tell if it fixes the connection dropping issue but I am hopeful that Fat Fan McGee will do his job.

I'm pretty confident that no one is still reading at this point, but if you are: first things first, go have yourself a drink or two. You deserve it. Second, and this is really the more important part: get a life dude!

A big special "thank you" to the following people who made this mod possible:
My Wife: Thank you for helping me solder and allowing me to neglect you for 2 days while I worked on this project.
My Dad: Thank you for letting me borrow your tools.
ExcaliburMM: Thank you for being the only person who even bothered responding to my post on the Anandtech forums.
And last, but certainly not least, Fat Fan McGee: you really got screwed on this project but thanks for sticking to it *rimshot*

Well, that's it for now. Thanks for reading (or at least attempting to read) about my little project. I am working on putting together a Picasa album for the pictures. I'll let you know when it's done and where to find it. Also, if I can get over myself and stop being butt-hurt that no one at the Anandtech forums answered my post, I'll probably write a guide and post it there, on how to mod your own RNX-N4, if you happen to have one. See you next post (all 4 of you).