Fix Your Broken Headphone Jack

Music is for everyone and over the years music is becoming more and more accessible by different devices like iPod's, Phones, etc. And the most common way to listen to music is to use your headphones and enjoy the music and most headphones use a standard 3.5mm jack.

But the everyday use and the vertical alignment of these headphone jacks causes it to wear out and after some time it just stops working. Now, if you have a good pair of headphones it would be a impractical to replace the headphones, but one alternative is you can replace the headphone jack by yourself, which is really simple to do and saves you the cost of a new pair of headphones.

In this Instructable, I'm going to show you How to replace your broken 3.5mm Headphone jack.

Here is what you need to get started

• 3.5mm jack
• Soldering Iron
• Soldering Wire
• Soldering Flux
• Wire Stripper
• Match Box or candle

Caution: This project requires some basic soldering knowledge if you do not know how to solder, there are a lot of YouTube videos that show you how to do solder.

The 3.5mm jack comes in two types, one with 3 terminals and one with 4 terminals. The 3 terminal jack is for stereo audio and the one with 4 terminals is for an additional microphone. In this instructable I'm going to show you how to fix a three terminal jack, but even the 4 terminal one is quite similar and you could follow along with this instructable.

Let's start with cutting out the old jack, you should leave out about 1cm of wire from the jack, this is not necessary, but it would be safer to avoid any wire damage near the jack. You could use a wire stripper or a pair of scissors to cut out the cable.

After you cut out the wire you have to remove the insulation and depending on your headphones you should have either 3 or 4 or 5 wires. Three or four wires represent a stereo headphones without microphone and 5 wires represent a microphone or volume control.

Before soldering you need to remove the insulation on the wires this could be done by burning the tip of the wires with the help of a candle or match stick. Removing insulation may cause the wire to char up, you need to clean the wire with some sandpaper before proceeding to soldering it to the new 3.5mm jack.

The final step is to solder the wire to the new headphone jack best way to do it to use some solder flux over the wire and pre-solder the wire before soldering it to the new headphone jack. If you have two or more copper colored wires you need to solder it together and that solders to the longest terminal on the new headphone jack.

Next, you need to solder the individual channel wires which is generally color coded as red and blue and red and green. After you solder all the terminals check the headphones for audio before inserting the headphone cap back on to the jack.

And now you should have successfully replaced your headphones jack and you can go back to enjoying music.

That's all folks!!

For more such Instructables comment below. For any doubts or assistance DM me. Happy to work as freelancer.