How to Repair Damaged Printed Circuit Board Pads Step 1: Tidy Up the Damaged Track 1: Step 2: Tidy Up the Damaged Track 2: Step 3: Exposing the Track: Step 4: Sticking Copper Tape Over the Exposed Track: Step 5: Soldering the Copper Tape Joints: Step 6: Pierce to Make the Hole: Step 7: Solder in Your Component: Step 8: Carefully Trim the Repair: Click to see full answer. Keeping this in consideration, how do you know if your PCB is damaged?Look for blackened components or melted or broken parts of the printed circuit traces, the little metal lines that connect components together on both sides of the board. Components can burn out and when they do they can smoke. Also look for swollen or discolored components.Secondly, how do you fix a copper trace? Gently scrape away the coating on the trace to expose the bare copper as shown here. Clean both ends of the open trace. Once you have the copper traces tinned, with a piece of solid wire (also referred to as bus bar wire), solder one end of the wire to the first half of the open trace. Consequently, how do you solder a PCB trace? Touch the tip of soldering iron to the pin of the component. Apply solder, move towards next hole on the perfboard again apply solder go on tracing the holes towards the components from the IC or transistor and connect each hole. This will give you a clean solder track.What causes a PCB to fail?Environmental Factors: Exposure to heat, dust and moisture, accidental impact (drops and falls), and power overloads/surges can be causes of circuit board failure. However, the most damaging cause of premature circuit board failure is electrostatic discharge (ESD) at the assembly stage.