There are several known issues with the apple MBP power supply. Some of these failures are caused by the bad construction of the MagSafe plug.

My power adapter has been working great for 3 years now, when it suddenly started to refuse to charge.

The bad thing is: The power supply itself is still working fine, it was just a defect within the plug, but yo can’t buy this part separately, you should buy a complete new thing for about 90 €.

So, the only possibility was to get our own hands dirty.

This is the target object:

In this pic you can see the problem with this plug. The inner pins stuck within the jack. We tried to release them, but the springs seems to be broken. So the pins couldn’t get  proper contact to connector on the MBP.

First we had to open the plug. With a japan saw and a dremel we cut it open on two sides.

Pull it off carefully.

After removing the case we could see a small PCB with an IC and LEDs on each side.

It is covered with some soft plastic like silicone, which we heatened to pull it off. But it is not necessary for this procedure. We did it just out of interest.

To remove the iron tip we pushed out the brass pins with a big needle.

After that, we remove the small plastic plate.

We tested the naked plug and it worked…

So the solution was to get the pins closer to the connector. Therefore we had to shorten the iron tip as well as the plastic small plate.

We needed to remove nearly 1mm of iron. But this might differ from your needs.

From the plastic plate we sandpapered the top layer down. Maybe you could also leave it at all.

Here you see the reassembled plug. The only thing you can’t see is that we put some hot glue on the PCB again and fixed the whole thing with a shrink tube.

And: It just works!