After collapsing, a trip to the hospital’s emergency room and several days of struggling with normal daily activities with an injury, my finger now just has this sensitive piece of new flesh with the old skin around it.

I want to peel it just like a windburn, but I wonder if i would be peeling my whole skin off before I finish. That would be a gruesome sight.

Anyway I’m actually glad it’s now healing well, I guess I just need to continue intakes of Vitamin C and A. Carrots and oranges might do the trick.

I’ve discovered that a carrot-orange shake taste pretty good (I’m not a vegetable/fruit fan).

(Note: If you have a 5-wire Skullcandy FMJ earphone, please view this article instead.)

So you’ll need a different 3.5mm jack for connecting the microphone, one with 4 connections. It is called a TRRS connector (stands for Tip-Ring-Ring-Sleeve, TRS is the regular stereo plug like above, stands for Tip-Ring-Sleeve).  The extra ring will allow us to connect another channel – it is for the microphone. So it is Stereo + Mic plug, here’s a picture for your reference:

Now let me show you where the connections goes inside the plug, before i will give you the colors description… here:

(As you can see there’s tin on it as i soldered and desoldered it many times.)

A better look on the connections:

Now this is the wires in the FMJ black cable: (notice it is the newer version and it has one more wire – the copper twisted blue wire – they’ve split the ground wire to 2 wires for each channel instead of 1.)

The wires should go as follows:

(notice that the ground connection contains 3 wires.)

Here are the descriptions for the wires:

(Note: If your Skullcandy FMJ has 6 wires instead of 5, please read this article instead.)

I love my Skullcandy FMJ. It has good bass and shiny design. I use it on my Samsung YP-P2 and really love the sounds. However, there were two things I didn’t really like: the symmetrical cable (left ear cable is same length as right ear cable.) and the JACK.

(NOTE: I know there are people who like symmetrical cables and that’s OK too. It’s just that I tend to tug at symmetrical cables more often so for me, asymmetrical cables work better.)

Now Skullcandy FMJ’s jack is LONG, and when I put my MP3 player in my pocket and walk, the wire connected to the jack gets stressed and bended. Now my FMJ is broken, and I cannot hear any bass anymore.

I didn’t bother using the warranty since it’s my fault that my earphones got broken, and I wanted to do some tinkering too. I bought a pair of earphone jacks at a local hardware store, metal ones, for around $1.00. It came in twos so I just bought it anyway thinking I have a spare in case I failed at my first attempt to solder.

I snipped off the end part of my earphones and threw the defective jack away.

The first thing I did was insert the spring and main body (sorry I don’t know what it’s called… can you tell me please?) into the cable. I won’t be able to assemble the whole jack if I solder first then inserted these things.

I tied a simple knot at the end to prevent these things from sliding off interfering with my work. I found 5 insulated wires and there were uninsulated copper strands around too.

Now I actually didn’t know which color is for which sound channel, so I tried to experiment by connecting the bare jack into my laptop, and used trial-and-error to determine the correct connections. I also researched through the Internet and found out some important things:

• The jack with 2 black rings is a stereo jack, and it has 3 connections: ground, left channel and right channel.
• Left channel is, if not most of the time, always the red wire.
• In order to determine the wires for left and right channels, I must connect the ground wire to the jack first.
• Not connecting the ground wire results in both left and right channels sounding off to either left or right ear only.

And after a few hours of tinkering (lol too long), I have this:

The wires are insulated with something, so for wires this thin, I had to burn the insulation off. I wrapped a strip of paper around the cord and exposed only the wires I wanted to burn. I then lighted these insulated wires with a match and the flame died as it reached the paper wrapping.

I carefully wiped the soot off the wires with tissue, twisted them and inserted them to the corresponding contact points.

Of course before I made permanent changes by soldering, I tested if the connections work by inserting the jack into the audio player, checking if the wires made contact cleanly and if the wires are connected to the correct channels. I also clamped the wire in place by using long-nosed pliers to save me some frustration if ever I accidentally tugged on the wire and the connections I made gets disconnected.

I also snipped the unknown wires (I have a hunch that those are for the microphone, but I did not want to use the mic so that’s fine with me) using whatever is available in my room– in this case my nail cutter.

Now I soldered the wires in place, and snipped the excess wires to prevent short-circuits.

Remember the spring and main body? The parts that I don’t know what they’re called? I assembled it now to the jack to cover the soldered parts. This metal jack had threads so I just screwed the jack in place.

And actually that’s it! I was pleased to be able to use my repaired Skullcandy earphones. I did not notice any difference in sound compared to when it was brand new (no static, no lower quality sound) so I was really happy.