Recapping a Sega Game Gear

I got a couple of Sega Game Gears in a auction a while back, sold as not working. This is a fairly common experience as the GG's have terrible caps which tend to leak and go bad. Luckily the fix is a fairly straight forward recapping and then you should be good to go.

I started on this last night, here are a couple of pic for reference for anyone else that wants to take a shot at this. I'll update with more posts as I go.

First off, decapping and cleaning the audio board.

So this is what it looks like:

You can see all the gunk from the leaking caps around the coil.

More horrible leaked electrolyte on the bottom of the board

My process is to snip the caps in half with a very sharp set of clippers making sure that I don't apply pressure to the solder joints.

The target cap is the little guy in the bottom left

Snipped in half

Start by snipping the cap in half. These things stink like bad fish :( nasty...
Once you have half of the cap off you should be able to gently remove the bottom half leaving the two legs exposed.

Most of the cap removed

After that you can gently pry off the base plastic of the cap and then fairly easily de-solder the legs. Use some flux and add solder initially to get the legs off and to get through any build up of electrolyte residue.

Board after de-soldering all the caps

Finish off with a good circuit board cleaning spray or as close to 100% isopropol alcohol as you can get and it comes up fairly nicely:

De-soldered and cleaned

-(e)