Benji Valdez

How to fix an iPod car stereo cassette adapter

Today I decided to fix a broken cassette adapter that I use to connect my iPod Touch to my car stereo, and figured what the hell, why not document the process? So today I’ll show you how to fix one so you can do it yourself if you want. Though I should probably mention that if you don’t have any of the tools for this, and don’t know anybody you can borrow them from, you’re probably better off just Cassette Adapter since you can find one between $5-10.
Also, forgive the terrible photos, I only had my camera phone to work with and when I went to transfer them to the computer something went wrong and they didn’t show up on my MicroSD card. So I had to use hard drive recovery software to get them back and unfortunately a couple got eaten in the process. If you need to though you can click on a few of them for a bigger picture. Anyway on to the process.

Below is a picture of what it looks like, as you can see the wire on mine got severed.
If yours is broken at a different place and you can’t use the original cord, no worries, either use the cord from an old junky pair of headphones. If you don’t have an old pair of headphones go to your local dollar store and buy a cheap pair of headphones for a dollar and use the cord from those.

The minimum amount of tools you’ll need to fix the cassette adapter are wire strippers, a phillips screwdriver, and a soldering iron + wet sponge/napkin/old cloth/etc. Plug in the soldering iron now so it gets hot enough by the time you need to use it, and make sure to keep it away from anything that’s going to burn or melt.

Alright so the next thing you wanna do is use the cutting part of you wire strippers and just cut the wire at the part where it’s damaged, if you’re using a wire from a pair of headphones you can skip this step.

Now use your screwdriver and take out all the screws, mine had four in the back and two in front. Yours might be different though, I have another one and it has five screws in the back only.

And so here’s what it looks like when opened, make sure you don’t lose any pieces when you open it. I almost lost a tiny metal bar on the floor when I first opened mine, I didn’t even hear it fall out. I also took apart a Panasonic one a long time ago and it had all kinds of pieces in it that were a pain in the ass to put back together. It was a pretty old one though and luckily these newer ones don’t seem to be as complicated.

Now in this picture I’ve pointed out the wires that you’ll need to desolder. Yours might look a little different which is ok, just make sure you remember which wire goes where, because if you switch them around the wrong way it might not work. It would be a good idea to write it down where they go, or take a picture of it. While I was doing this I actually did forget where the wires went, but luckily since I was taking pictures I was able to put it back together the right way.

I’d recommend taking the whole PC Board out if you can, just in case you accidentally touch the soldering iron to the cassette shell, because it will melt.

Next take your soldering iron and just touch the little bulb of solder that the wire is connected to and pull the wire off. It should come right off without having to keep the iron there very long. Do this for each wire, and like I said before don’t forget where each wire went. You did write it down didn’t you?

Next you need to take your cord and wire strippers and strip off the insulation from wires so that it looks like the picture below. btw sorry for the crappy quality, I had taken a better picture of this but it was one of the pictures that was eaten by my computer.

Ok, now you want to solder the wires back to where they belong. All you have to do is just hold the wire down to the little solder bulb on the PC Board and use the soldering iron to just ‘tack’ it on. It shouldn’t take much and you don’t want to heat up the board with the iron too long or the traces on the PC Board could peel off.
Do this with each wire, making sure you are soldering them in the right place, remember what I said above about writing it down or taking a picture?

After you’re done with that, just put everything back together, and hopefully you didn’t lose any little pieces.

So there you have it, how to fix a car stereo cassette adapter. The only thing is that most people are probably switching to FM transmitters now. I got a couple of them, but I think they’re junk. I bought a cheap one at first, but even though it says it’s stereo it’s only mono. Plus it only transmits to a few stations and it’s pretty staticy. So then I went and got a Belkin one that transmits to any station, but it was worse than the first one as far as static and battery life. So then I found this guide on how to make the Belkin Tunecast II transmit better, which worked pretty good but then the screen got cracked somehow so I have no idea which channel it’s transmitting to anymore. So for those like me and still have cassette decks in their cars, but want to use their iPod (or other mp3 player) instead of listening to the radio, here’s my guide on how to fix your cassette adapter if it gets broken.