Cheap and Easy Combo Meter Repair

Figured I'd share this with y'all. Bought my 07 back in December and the combo meter was bad. I almost never had dash lights and always had to do that thing to turn off the car.

I found a young guy in town that specializes in repairing laptop computers. I called him up and asked him if he could solder new capacitors into a circuit board. He told me he could and it would cost me $20. I ran straight over and handed him the board. He ordered replacement capacitors as I stood there. Each one was like $1.50-3.00 and shipping was $6-7.

A week later I picked it up and paid him $35. He said the capacitors he put in were a much higher quality than the OEM and would last a lot longer.

Anyway, thought I'd share that. It's a cheap and easy fix. There's a local Prius mechanic here in town and he wanted $550 to repair it. He said he swapped the capacitors himself but I doubt that. I bet he just got the Texas Hybrid refurb. I nearly ordered the Texas Hybrid refurb but I couldn't get that nagging feeling out of my head that all I needed was someone who knew how to solder into a circuit board.

 

Camp 2 here. Ten-twenty minutes to remove the dash, another 10 to remove the circuit board and about the same amount of time to put it back. I've soldered components off of and back onto circuit boards once before. They were the type where the component wires poked through and soldered onto the back of the board. Easy as pie. So I actually bought the caps off amazon to do my combo meter.

Once I saw that this board wasn't like that and the components were tightly packed and the entire thing seemed so fragile I decided there was no way I was gonna do it. As for "outsourcing to a 16 yo", not sure where you got that idea. This kid is probably 30 and has his own business repairing lap top computers and any other computer you wanna bring to him. When I picked up the combo meter another young man came in to pick up his $7000 fluid cooled gaming computer that was sitting on the bench. This kid was legit.

Anyway, I'm sure no matter the city you live in there's gotta be someone who fixes lap tops or cel phones or whatever else you can think of. Twenty years ago there were numerous TV and stereo repairmen in my town. They're all gone now.

Glad to share with y'all.