I spent about 3 hours over the last few weeks figuring out what to do after getting my D2B cut-leg Wii opened. I figured out I needed to use a dremel to expose some solder points on the chip, then wire them to the Wiikey modchip.

So I had my brother in law (thanks Chad) solder the Wiikey to the board, via the official manual (pdf). He used a 0.5mm tip on an 8W soldering iron with the thinnest solder that Radio Shack had. He looked at the size of the solder points that would be exposed post-dremel, and he opted out of doing it. It really isn’t for the faint at heart.

Today I went over my father-in-law’s house to finish the job. I used the smallest dremel tip he had to grind away right above the three cut points, until I saw some of the exposed points. I then cleaned it up with some rubbing alcohol and a Qtip. I put a little solder on each of the points, cleaning as necessary — also known as “tinning” the points. I cut 3 sets of about 2″ long 34AWG Beldon Magnet Wire, then stripped the ends with sandpaper and tinned about 1/8″ on each side. With that same 0.5mm tip on the 8W soldering iron, I carefully connected one side of each of the wires to the exposed points. Then I connected them to the three points on the wiikey, like this picture.

I practiced the whole process about 3 times on an old motherboard. The whole process took me about 4 hours from start to finish. I put the Wii back together (somehow ending up with 3 unused screws), then plugged it in, and what do ya know, it still works!

Next steps would be to run the setup disk on the Wii, preparing it for use, then upgrading to the latest version, then finally testing some games. There must be something wrong with my burner, because the official setup disks made me about 4 coasters already.

Oh well, I’m just glad I didn’t destroy the Wii in the Wiikey install process.