Fire Muhaha (Playing With Matches)

Before I Start with this I Do have to mention 4 Things

  1. Bodgeit and Scarper Taught me this (These will likely be mentioned in further stories)
  2. It Was Safe / Risk Assessed (I Have written many fire related risk assessments)
  3. Do not try this at home (or work)
  4. This was done when I was the only person in the building

So, this is a useful know how to have, if you have the ability to do it safely without annoying facilities / setting off a fire alarm.
Note; Nothing crazy happens in this story, its just interesting enough to have its own page.

The Story

As many of you know, headphone jacks will break off into computers / laptops etc and they are an utter pain in the backside to remove. Sometimes you can be lucky and just stick the broken end back in and it be fine.
But Rarely are things that simple.

It turns out that many biros/cheap pens/bics have the plastic ink reservoir that’s only a touch smaller than the 3.5mm of a normal headphone jack.
Plastic is Plastic, and Plastic melts when exposed to heat.

So, what you do is prepare the device by turning it off, and then heat up the end of the ink reservoir.
If you are very quick, and VERY Careful, you can get the end into the headphone port whilst the plastic is still soft and sticky, give it a few minutes to cool then pull.
If you are lucky you now have a burn pen and the end from a broken headphone jack.

I had done this a few times; Using the side of an old dell to not burn my desk. Succeeded once I think.
This is sometimes worth a try when the inside of a port is shielded on the motherboard and there isn’t a pokey hole to poke a paper clip though.
I Tried the proper tools made for it with even less success than fire.

I Think nowadays I’d probably just pull the shielding off the port than mess with pens and matches, but I Do have a smoke detector in my current office…