Motivated by the desire to chat on Skype with a young female acquaintance* I decided it was about time I repaired my Jabra headset charger. Unfortunately it was the central prong inside the male socket that had broken off. I have tried in the past to solder pins in such awkward places and found, the hard way, that it just Doesn’t Work.**
Oh, yes. And my soldering iron is at my mum’s house.
So I used one of the charger’s own casing screws as a replacement pin. It’s too fat, but it only needs to touch the end of the female plug to make electrical contact. It did damage some other parts inside the socket assembly while being screwed in, but it’s better that way because the increased pressure will maintain the contact between the screw and the stump of the old pin. Thus I felt it prudent to insert a small kaolin-saturated piece of paper from the cover of a glossy news magazine, in order to prevent the contacts shorting when the plug is removed and draining the headset’s battery the exciting way.
Of course, the screw sticks out a bit, so I had to apply some judicious penknife to the inside of the case. But from the outside, you can’t tell. Apart from a missing screw, of course.
Sweet.
* Always good motivation. Unfortunately she went to bed… oops.
** Luckily the pin on that Pentium 3 was connected to the power rail, and therefore multiply redundant.
The Fifth Wheel of andrewg 
Your soldering iron?
*ahem* the soldering iron that I usually use. Better?
Yes, much. Though I do now have the problem of setting up a new tool box for my self on this side of the planet, so the ownership of any of those tools is somewhat up in the air (though mum is claiming them all on general principle).