My nephew bought a TV at Goodwill for just fifteen dollars the other day, so that he and his friend can play XBox games side by side with their own screens in my apartment. I’m such a pushover that I let him do this, but anyways, the little prong on the yellow video input plug broke.

Why is this a big deal? The prong broke inside the jack, so we had to unscrew the TV housing in order to get to the rear of the jack and push the prong out. This was not cut and dried and both my nephew and I have come to appreciate how much of modern consumer electronics is designed so that you can’t easily get at the innards.

This is the TV:

A cable with working prongs is inserted into the jacks beneath the screen in this ‘post-op’ photo.

And this is the broken prong:

You’ll notice the solder where we tried to attach the prong back to the plug. The plug cable is cut because we also tried to attach a conventional video input plug to the damaged XBox cable, but that didn’t work either.

This is how a cross-section of the cable looks:

Now that I think about it some more, I wonder if there is a connector that will join severed pieces of cable together. If so, we may yet be in business. Otherwise, my neph will have to buy a new cable.

This item on ebay looks like it’s what we want. And at the time I’m reading this, the Buy It Now selling price is $10.98 with free shipping. That’s not so bad. But I’m sure my nephew would rather not spend any money at all.

Sorry I don’t have any pictures of the TV housing opened. After we screwed it back together, I said to my nephew, “You know, I should have taken a picture.” And he agreed. But I’m still new to this concept of DIY photoblogging.

Anyhow the amazing thing is not that we took the TV apart, but that we put it back together and it still works. Since we got the broken prong out of the jack, we did actually fix the TV. It’s the Microsoft custom cable that is the problem child. Why am I not surprised?