Here's more, copied from a few pages back:
anyone trying the direct to dock pins method - Have a dead iPod or iPod dock available to "harvest" some extra pins from the female dock. The pins are extremely frail, fussy, and easy to lose. Once separated from the board they pull right out of the dock. It really isn't that hard to remove them. The ones on the iPod you you are working on - you will want to desolder while getting an xacto blade tip behind them and they pop right off.
Any "spares" you get from a donor you can just use that xacto knife blade to wildly cut them off the board then pull them from the dock with small tweezers.
You will want to solder your wires to the pins while they are removed from the dock. If you look at the dock, counting from the left, you are operating on pins #3 and 4. #3 is right signal, #4 is left signal. On pin #3 you will want to solder your wire kind of on the left side of it, on pin #4 solder kind of on the right. The first time I soldered the wires centered on the pins and just the thin film of solder on each was thick enough that when the pins were back in the dock they were touching intermittently. The area here is soooo small that you want to verify individual pin isolation and continuity (as needed) with a multimeter.
When the pins go back into the dock they are all wacky and fussy as well so you want to make sure they are seated properly in their grooves on the other side of the dock and hit them with a dab of hot glue to secure them.
(I have since switched to using epoxy here)