One of the wires from my Cooler Master Laptop Cooler broke, likely from the sharp edges of the product and the weight of my laptop. The product has a usb port which powers two fans under a laptop stand. It does a good job of keeping my laptops cool. In fact, my 6 year old laptop is actually usable for more than 10 minutes because it doesn't turn itself off due to high temperatures.

The construction is two parts: a laptop stand with holes in the bottom, and two usb-powered fans that snap into the bottom. From the usb plug there is a wire which splits into two wires, one for each fan. It turns out that each of the wires going to the fans actually contains two wires, red and black. The red wire was broken to one of the fans. As frustrating as this was, at least it was fixable.

So off to the hardware store to get electrical tape and a wire stripper. First I had to remove a good amount of the casing that contained the two wires to make room to work. I then stripped about an inch of wire from each end of the red wire. The hard part was carefully wrapping the stripped wire ends together so that they would hold, I think I managed to get three wraps from each side.

From here I had to carefully wrap the fragile connection with electrical tape. This took about 5 tries to find a wrapping strategy that actually seemed to hold everything together. I found that a very helical wrap worked best. By very helical I mean minimal overlap of the tape with itself during the wrap. I also found that it needed a least a quarter inch of anchor to the insulated part of the wire.

The problem at this point was that the red wire was much shorter than the black wire (due to my attempts at stripping the wire without the wire strippers). So I ended up cutting the black wire and performing something similar. The tape wrapping was more difficult because the red wire was in the way.

In the end, I re-wrapped the two mended wires together and I had two working fans again.