route a wire
The most important thing in all of this mod is to secure your wires before you start soldering new wires down. Make sure you cut the wire to the right length and then strip them short. Next, secure the wires down the specified path using electrical tape (more reversible) or hot glue (more permanent). The danger of not securing the wires before soldering is that you may lift the pad and make it a nightmare to deal with. In addition, this allows for easier soldering as well.
First tackle the wire at the capacitor pads near the DAC. The pads are pretty large and it’s a good warmup before soldering near the dock. Take one wire at a time. I would ensure that the wires are shaped correctly before soldering to reduce the strain.
Now tackle the second wire and again make sure that there is minimal strain as you solder them on.
If something awful were to happen, have no fear. There are actually three possible solder points leading to the ipod dock connector. The largest and probably easiest is the one mentioned above (the south pad of the inductor). If you get a lifted pad, I would next go to the bare circular metal pads south of the inductor / capacitor pair, shown here at the green arrows:
with the top green arrow connected to L3 and the bottom green arrow connected to L2. If you skipped desoldering the capacitor and the inductor pair dock side, then this is the best possible place to come to solder your wire to since there is definitely more open space around these pads. If you end up lifting that pad too, the next place you could go is the north pad of the tiny capacitors (red arrows) since those are also connected to the dock.
To sum up the order of preference in soldering the wires to dock side, first go to the south pad of the inductor if you desoldered them. Second go to the bare circular pad. Third go to the tiny north pad of the capacitors lined up with L2/L3. Finally and really only as a last resort, go to the dock pins directly (though your ipod may not close as easily).
close the ipod
Before you close the ipod, I would definitely use a multimeter and attempt to make sure that you don’t have solder bridges and that the wire is connected properly. The best way to do this in my opinion is to test the south pad on the caps near the DAC (but not touch the wire) to the bare circular metal pads near the dock. Next make sure that there is no connection to the neighboring components on the dock side (since there are a lot of small components there).
Close the ipod in reverse of how you took it apart. Here is the tutorial again for your reference.
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