Etymotic MK5 wire repair?

Has anyone ever figured out how to take these apart and install new wires? I pulled on the rubber wire cover and got that down but nothing beyond that. I'd like to not have to destroy it. I have ER6's that are repairable but these just seem to be closed tight, no way in.

My experience has been that is more like a number of very fine wires with “thread” intermingled with the wires. I have made this configuration work again......but it wasn’t pretty
OM

Destroyed, but not with some valuable information

I pulled the rubber fittings on the ends of the earbuds and ripped them. When you have the plastic fitting off you can see that these are in the plastic end in such a way as never to be removed without damaging them. Then I bent the black plastic ends off the earbuds which broke the plastic. The ends are filled with a gluey substance similar to that in TPMS transmitters that hold the battery in. If I had known that I could have used a heat gun or hair dryer before pulling the plastic off. I think that would have softened the glue enough to pull the rubber and plastic ends off together as a unit hopefully without breaking them. It’s also a good idea to spray some WD40 into the rubber wire fitting on the end of the earbud so that it will let you slide the end off without binding on the wire. After that you have to clean the glue off the exposed speaker end where the wires are soldered on. The heat gun helps make this easier. From then on you can remove the old wires and solder new ones in place, a very delicate operation that requires a needle nosed solder iron. In my case one of the buds just didn’t work even before this operation, so it was pointless to continue. However, if both of yours work and just the wires are bad, using a heat gun or hair dryer might let you take these apart more successfully than I have.

Maybe possible if you have a friend who is a neurosurgeon and dabbles in electronics.

akbeemer said:

Maybe possible if you have a friend who is a neurosurgeon and dabbles in electronics.

Click to expand...

Close guess! Actually my son is an electrical engineer and has done several repairs on my ER6i's wires with a magnifier and soldering setup he has at work. Unlike me he can solder the smallest of items without ham handing them like I have done here. On other items almost every repair that was for an "intermittent" connection turned out to be due to a cracked solder joint that was easily fixed by just remelting the solder. Soldered connections and moving/flexing/vibrating vehicles don't go together well, they eventually crack and disconnect. You can only see the cracked joints with a magnifier.