Bell 3-way car power adapter

Update- Blog moved to: http://saleemabdulhamid.com/blog/2009/11/bell-3-way-car-power-adapter

I went through two of these Bell 3-way car power adapters last week:

It was $12.99 at Pepboys, part no. 39023-4. I haven't been able to find this exact one online, although I haven't looked very much and there are admittedly thousands of variations on it so finding it may be a bit difficult. Anyone who comes across it on a site that has reviews should send me a link so I can leave a review for it.

So the first one lasted about 30 mins on the highway I think, but I didn't even notice it was not working. What happened was, two of the ports died while the third, the one farthest from the switch was still fine (you'll see why this happened in a minute). So the one my iPod Dock was plugged into was working, while the GPS had switched to battery without me even noticing, until about an hour and a half later when it started telling me the battery was low.

Now, for some reason, I decided to return it without opening it up to see what was wrong. Crazy, right? In my defense, it was only one day old, and I was going to Pepboys that day again anyway, and I was worried if I broke something visible they might not take it back.

Anyway, I got a second one, and it lasted a bit longer than the first. This one I mounted properly in the car, rather than letting it kick around on the floor, and it lasted about a week before one of the ports died on me. A day or two later the second one also died and I was back where I started with the first one.

This time, I was smart enough to open it up. I mean it's not like there could be anything that complicated in there, right? It's just a three way power split. So maybe there's some flaw in the design that I can fix instead of exchanging it again.

Sure enough, the problem was just poor manufacturing and took a screwdriver, soldering iron, and all of five minutes to fix. Four screws on the back of the unit have to be removed for it to split into two halves (ignore the screws in the mounting brackets):

As soon as I opened it, I saw the problem. This is the fixed one, but before I resoldered it, the solder points of the first two ports had been just touched with solder and so very easily, with a little wiggling, they had come undone:

I resoldered those points, touched up all the other solder joints for good measure and reassembled and now it's working as good as (better than?) new.