Senior Jordan Leaman is qualified for health insurance through eBay. He has sold enough merchandise online for internet sales to be his full time job.

When his iPod Touch broke freshman year, Leaman decided to fix it, instead of paying for a new one. He ended up selling it online to buy an iPhone, and of course, that broke too. He discovered parts were cheap on eBay.

“And then I figured out that I could actually make money buying broken [iPhones] on eBay, repairing and reselling them,” Leaman said.

After following a few guides on the internet, Leaman has taught himself how to fix almost anything. Leaman repairs mostly iPhones, although he’s also worked on iPods, iPads, and cameras. Recently, he ordered an iPhone 4S which came to his house in pieces, half of which were broken.

“The motherboard was water damaged. The battery connector was broken; I had to solder on a new one,” Leaman said. “It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever worked on. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to fix it completely.”

Despite this fact, he can still resell it on eBay as an almost perfect iPhone.

Sometimes, Leaman spends a lot of time trying figure out what’s wrong with the item he’s working on.
“You take apart everything and see if you can spot the problem,” Leaman said. “Usually I buy iPhones that I know exactly what’s wrong, like a broken screen.”

Leaman recently built a car stereo with a 12 volt battery, which is basically a small car battery. He’s built this type of stereo before, and each time it gets more expensive and sophisticated.

“A lot of this stuff I buy and quickly turn around and sell again,” Leaman said.

Like computers, graphing calculators and other underpriced items, he buys and put right back up on the market.

However despite his incredible brilliance in technology repair, Leaman lacks organization.

“There are boxes entirely filled with circuitry.” Leaman said.

Everything is packed onto shelves in his closet, only disturbed when something needs a little doctoring.

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