Broken Wacom Cintiq 21ux Stylus? Maybe This Will Help

Just wanted to make a post here that may be relevant to somebody and get them out of a hole.

Recently, my Wacom Cintiq stylus (itself a replacement for my broken original) started to ‘miss’ certain operations on the screen before getting steadily worse until it was finally just a useless stick of plastic. It seemed obvious straight away that it wasn’t a digital problem, i.e.; changed settings, etc., as the problem was one of decline rather than going from working to suddenly not. The problem must’ve been analogue and within the stylus itself.

As anyone who’s replaced a stylus knows they’re not cheap—my stylus model coming in at £100–so it was with a sinking feeling that I had to consider buying a third one. Of course, I would also have to ‘down-tools’ and not do any more work till a new one was delivered.

So, feeling I had little to lose, I started to see if I could strip the thing down and spot an obvious problem. By this point I didn’t care about voiding some manufacturer’s warranty by taking it apart; there seemed little likelihood I would be posting it off to be repaired.

The upshot is that I did discover an obvious problem: a connection failure where a wire had completely come away from a soldered connection. With some frustratingly fiddly soldering I managed to reconnect the wire. I did have to do this more than once due to re-breaking the connection while trying to re-assemble the parts, but finally managed to complete it and have a working stylus once more. So far it’s been trouble-free for about three weeks.

So, if you’re experiencing similar issues and don’t mind running the risk of doing some surgery (there’s always a risk of breaking a healthy connection or damaging the board through heavy handling) then it may save you money, time and heartache. However, the process I used to fix my problem was for an older Wacom Cintiq 21UX: what other models are like I have no idea.

Therefore if you swipe the images you will see I’ve tried to lay out and show the problem I had so you could attempt the same fix.

Good luck!

Noel Gallagher Caricature

 

A face-mash of Oasis and High Flying Birds' singer song-writer and guitarist, Noel Gallagher.

Tools: Sketchbook Pro + Affinity Photo.

HR Giger Caricature

 

Should have found a way to get this in for Hallowe’en—caricature of the surrealist(?) artist, HR Giger. I wonder what his Christmas cards were like. Swipe for lines.