And on the subject of turkey - I've eaten it once since my last mention of it.  It's been about six months now.

I'm not really a fan of turkey.

Well, I'm happy. I made it throught that icky holiday business with absolutely NO TURKEY!!!!

(I'm not a fan of turkey. Particularly stuffed roasted turkey. Ground turkey is decent, better than ground beef, but not as good as ground pork - but the nasty cardboard that is roasted stuffed turkey is something that I'm very happy to avoid eating... ever.)

After being handed a dead Apple AirPort Base Station, I decided to give fixing it a shot.

The original graphite base stations had a tendency to cook their power supply capacitors, causing a failure.

I found this site with a not awful article on the repair.

As always, the article complicates things unnecessarily, though. (static strap, desolder braid, cleaning the holes out... all unnecessary.)

The only things required are:

a phillips screwdriver (6 screws to be removed)

a soldering iron

2 electrolytic capacitors (I used jim-pak R470/25 - Shields Electronics, under $4 for a dozen)

a pair of nail clippers (cutting the leads after installing the new caps)

and a bit of solder.

The repair is simple enough that I'm not going to worry about the elaborate ventilation techniques they suggest - I don't want to screw up the looks. If it cooks the caps again, I think I can take care of it in about 20 minutes, and since I suspect that the originals were semi-defective to start with (and lasted 3 years anyway), I doubt it'll cook again.

A few tricks:

there's no need to use braid (or a pump) - just heat the lead, and rock the old cap away from the board. It's easy.

when putting the new cap in, heat the hole. the lead will push the old solder away. once it's all the way in, apply a bit of new solder, and cut the excess lead away.

test and reassemble. mine works fine - I'm using it now.