Fixing a game boy advance IN THE WOODS

Every year some good friends and I visit the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) for a 7-night camping trip. This time I fixed a Game Boy.
In this video I diagnose and repair a game boy advance (GBA) -- in the Wilderness! With only a screwdriver handy to open the shell, I have to get creative to make the fix with primitive tools!


0:00 - Intro
0:29 - Day 1 (Diagnosis)
1:28 - Day 2 (Procrastination)
1:46 - Day 3 (A-button repair)
3:15 - Day 4 (Audio repair)
4:26 - Day 5 (Time to Play)
5:10 - Day 8 (Return Journey)
5:36 - Outro


**************************Notes**************************

Day 6 & 7 are omitted since nothing productive was happening relating to the game boy repair on those days.. Including them would have just been filler content which I have more than enough of already.

Soldering in the woods: I didn't show much detail on how I got the nail in the stick for the soldering iron. What I did was cut one end of a random stick flat with a knife. Then I pounded the recovered nail partially in to the flattened stick end with the back end of a hatchet, Lastly I pulled the nail out, flipped it over and pressed the blunt end into the hole in the stick I had just made. It was a little wobbly but held well enough to make the fix! Another note is that the camp fire didn't get the nail hot enough until I gave a few hard blows with the pocket bellows (3:50) to stoke the embers underneath the tip of the nail. After 4:15 (off cam) I removed the nail from the stick, burned the stick, and pounded the nail back in the hole of the tree we found it in. It's as if I was never there.

*Behind the scenes: I wanted this video to be as genuine as possible, but also not be a complete failure, so there was some planning ahead of time to prevent that from happening. I disassembled the unit at home before the trip so I already knew what the problems were--I wanted to be sure there wasn't anything too terribly wrong with it that I couldn't handle out there. I figured the button would be a pretty straight forward fix, but I was far from confident that I could get the soldering to work. I even brought my own nail and a small torch as a plan B, but never had to use them since plan A of using only what was found in the environment ended up working out.