Laptop hinge repair

Sometimes, my friend, you don't do yourself any favours. With an arsy attitude like that, you don't deserve to get help with your half baked bodge repair projects. I offered you a solution based on the activities of a friend who is a proper professional at laptop repairs, that would not have cost you a lot of money, otherwise he wouldn't be doing it, as he makes a proper living at it, and I wouldn't have suggested it to you, knowing your penchant for fixing everything with some shit dissolved in epoxy, and some obscure material not intended for the job. So go ahead, and waste forty quidsworth of your time, on a bodged repair that won't last five minutes. Sheesh.

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily
Loading thread data ...

The kind of people who do such half assed repairs obviously don't value their time in the slightest. Spend twenty hours to save what a fast food clerk makes in an hour.

Reply to
AZ Nomad

Oh well said that man -

Ron

Reply to
Ron

and

it

of

expanded

or

Also

google

the

mention

bodge

have

a

your

some

minutes.

If I replaced the whole hinge, I'd have to find out how to take the laptop apart to get to the other part of the hinge, C-clip or whatever is buried inside. Anyone's guess what chance of colateral damage just doing that. Obtain a part, without being ripped off and having the correct one supplied. Whereas all I've to do is find a way of building up the lost few square mm of aluminium of the hinge anchor plate and make good some of the broken away and missing plastic of the display surround/lid. All nicely exposed and easy to work on. Why go to all that bother if a bit of epoxy and some Al mesh/ minimal hardware/drilling is all that's required. The hinge mount failed in quite normal use , so direct replacement likely to do the same.

Reply to
N_Cook

Because, when you are doing work for people who are good enough to entrust their repairs to you, it's about both appearing to be, and *actually being* professional about the way you tackle the job. I wonder how you would feel about a garage that fixed your clutch cable by joining it with an electrical junction block, rather than replacing it, because the bodge was cheaper and easier to do ?

Honestly, I don't know how you manage to make a living judging by some of the threads you post on here. Yes, you are right that the title of this group includes the word "repair", but I can't believe how literally you seem to take that. Repairing often involves fitting new genuine replacement parts, and especially it does when you are doing the work commercially ...

Arfa

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily

(apparently

has

baked

a

makes

forty

laptop

buried

mm

mesh/

being*

electrical

and

seem

I get the customer self-referals from my local "commercial " outfit, no name mentioned. Customers charged 20 GBP up front, no refund. If its changing a switch , gain pot, jack socket they go ahead and do that and charge extra. If it requires diagnosis of a proper electronic, rather than self-evident mechanical fault ,they hang on to it , return it 3 months later, saying they cannot get the parts, 20 squid , that'll do nicely.

Reply to
N_Cook

So if an actual replacement is expected to fail in the same fashion what makes you think you can make a stronger repair? Sure this is possible but having intimate knowledge of laptop repair and the structure and stresses imposed I think you'll find out in the end you are wasting time. And while that in its self isn't a real horrible thing to do if it interferes with your credibility on a shoddy solution was it worth it?

You can usually find disassembly instructtion for laptops online so really no excuse not to splay it out and do a proper repair.

Reply to
Meat Plow

Exactly. My new pickup truck back in 2000 started leaking oil after

10,000 miles. Back to the dealer it went where they informed me that the place for rear engine shaft bearing (according to the manufacturer) had been improperly bored on a particular run of this engine. The service manager explained he could have probably boged a repair using some JB Weld and sent me on my way but chose to replace the entire short block. I gain a lot of respect for that man in doing the proper repair and not a bodge that might or might not have lasted for the rest of the life of the vehicle.
Reply to
Meat Plow

A lot of hostility on this thread. I can understand it. There is a whole lot of people bidding down in PC and Laptop repairs. This means there are people getting away with quick and dirty fixes just to underbid and put someone out of work who would do a proper repair.

Begs the question why certain people just don't get a job with sanitation dept. rather than recycling.

Reply to
JB

laptop

supplied.

These are the things you have to know better than the average bear.

mm

away

easy

in

Unless you are incompetent.

Reply to
JB

Hinge assemblies are separate components and totally separate from the internal frame. If you had ever replaced a laptop hinge, you would know that. There is usually a removable plastic strip just above the keyboard that covers the some of the lower end screws. Additional screws are sometimes found on the bottom of the laptop, and on the rear panel. Remove these and the LCD display can be separated from the laptop base, with the hinges still attached. In most cases, you will need to disassemble the LCD frame in order to gain access to the remaining screws. There is no C-clip unless you're planning to dissemble the hinge assembly itself. Example:

This was meant to show the really awful location of a wi-fi antenna, but shows the hinge construction quite clearly.

That depends on your experience level. I will admit to having destroyed a few laptops trying to disassemble them without proper instructions. More commonly, I get the screws mixed up. When re-assembled, the longer screws can do some real damage. If you've never done this before, there are disassembly diagrams in some of the service documentation online, or on various web sites.

To prevent disaster, I take photos as I go along and am very careful with organizing the screws:

I sometimes buy the wrong part. It happens. When I'm not sure and the part is cheap, I buy several from different vendors. I like to buy pairs of parts, especially on pullouts, so that if one is dead, the other might work.

No. All you have to do is gain the expertise and experience necessary to do this properly. It took me several tries to get it right, resulting in mixing my own formulation because I couldn't find anything that worked. What's your time worth?

If it were easy, you wouldn't be asking.

The hinge failed because the screws became loose. They became loose because there was insufficient thread surface area, too small a screw, no Loctite, excessive vibration, weak base metal, or a failed previous repair. When someone brings me a laptop, the first thing I check is the hinge. If it's loose, they can count on an extra 30 minutes of labor to fix it.

However, I do like your fatalistic attitude. I should point out that it also applies to all repairs. Why bother when it might happen again? Just throw it out and get a new laptop.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

That's my feeling too, and whilst the first one of any particular model might take a while to get apart, the next one will be a lot quicker. Personally, from a credibility point of view, I would not consider repairing a laptop hinge for a customer, in any way other than to replace it. According to my mate, most if not all are available at reasonable cost, and the time to dismantle and put a new one in, is not going to be any more - and probably a lot less - than a cobbled up 'repair' to the broken one would take. If the customer was not prepared to pay the cost of proper replacement parts, then I would still keep the deposit I'd taken for quoting it, and hand him it back. If he then went on to find a cheapskate who would bodge it up for him, chances are I'd still have the last laugh when it failed again shortly after the three months' repair warranty expired (if he even got that ...) knowing that he would probably be thinking that he should have had me do a proper job in the first place, and now daren't come back to me ... :-)

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily

I'm astounded (almost) that the things last as long as they do with the kind of force on them. I bought an Asus laptop back in 2004 that still serves me. I've had it apart once to repair the DC barrel connector after the solder broke due to poor design. There were no less than 60 screws that needed to be removed to get to the main board. But only 3 needed to be removed from the backside to get the keyboard out mainly due to the #2 memory slot being under the keyboard of all places.

If you look close on the bottom case you can see a couple little bumps from me using the couple 1/4mm longer screws to fasten the chassis to the bottom plastic :)

Didn't catch this until they were all back in and I wasn't going to undo everything. Lucky it was MY laptop, I would have been horrified to find this on a customer unit and would have been looking for a new bottom.

I'm sure we've all experienced collateral damage.

Reply to
Meat Plow

I have often thought the same Arfa - perhaps Mr Cook really would be more suited to a group called sci.electronics.remanufacture. The efforts that he goes to to "repair" stuff is jaw-dropping! I can understand the satisfaction gained in getting something up and running that is deemed commercially "unrepairable", but he does seem to go to extremes and I doubt that he has ever really costed his time into the jobs he does. In my past experience of such jobs when I have carried them out in order to do the customer a favour they are rarely appreciative - whats worse, if a "bodge" subsequently fails, no matter how far down the line, your reputation will suffer. As for "improvements" to the original spec......nuff said.

Roy

Reply to
Roy L

Ignoring time wasted on this thread. I'm not a structural engineer , but gut feeling, this repair could be stronger than the original. 3/4 hour spent, so far, curing epoxy currently, small cosmetic job to follow. Original was 1x 2.5mm screw into a plastic boss on the display outer, boss and small part of external case broke away.

2 x 1.5 mm holes drilled through the large remnant of the hinge anchor plate, 2 nuts and bolts and washers holding a returned loop of expanded aluminium of area about 15x35 mm epoxied through/around and over the scored remnant Al and bridging onto drill-pock-marked original part of case and into the reinforcing webs, not just flat plastic. When cured, then a skim of hotmelt glue plus dystuff and thick ptfe tape for moulding a patch, to patch the seen outside part of the display surround that broke away, owner knowing full well there will be a cosmetic blemish and that my repair will be a bodge job.

cf I hate to think how much time and money involved with the "proper" repair. Obtain correct replacement hinge and display outer casing. Download "how to dismantle pc" read up how to disassemble , separate bins for separate section screws etc, remake ribbon connections etc all without collateral damage to a ribbon/ connector or something indeterminant. Factor in chance of replacement wrong parts/ no parts arriving, perhaps weeks later, probability of fatally dislodging something vital inside the pc, reassemble lid/display outer.

Reply to
N_Cook

Not so much leaving as wanting to hear more from the techs. Haven't had much luck filtering the spam using Windoze Mail, which along with OE previously, has all my old postings and others in the various message folders.

I can visually scan the list of messages in a given newsgroup and filter accordingly, the trouble is there just aren't many relevant posts any more. Often I'll see fifty spam posts along with one or two legitimate posts which mostly don't even relate to my areas of interest. So many of our best seem to have left the room for good.

Once upon a time I might make several posts in any given day which might have some relevance or actually help someone. I was typing away so much my wife almost thought I was fooling around! Nowadays it's down to about one or two posts per week tops.

Mark Z.

Reply to
Mark Zacharias

" Why go to all that bother if a bit of epoxy and some Al

I have no problem - like you I suspect - with the art of the "technical bodge". After all, we were taught to "mend" stuff when I was an apprentice many many years ago. But there's a time and place in today's commercial world. A good example was the interesting thread last week about the card drive rubber in the HP unit. Finding and fitting, with success, an alternative to the original part which is no longer available, is fine for something you own yourself, and may be ok for a customer if there is genuinely no alternative, and they are prepared to specifically authorise you to carry out the repair in that way.

Sometimes, it's even ok to use the doctors' method of attacking the symptoms of a fault, rather than the cause, when a problem is particularly obscure, and lack of information or parts, renders the repair otherwise commercially unviable. However, again, when the job was for a customer, I would not go down this route without first explaining carefully, all of the alternatives, and then getting a specific approval to carry out the work in that way.

In all other cases, as a commercial repairer, with a reputation and standards to maintain, and with a desire to use my time to generate the maximum revenue for my business, I cannot entertain carrying out repairs by any method other than replacement of defective parts, with new ones, either of genuine manufacturer supply, or suitable third party ones with equivalent or superior specification.

I am also loathe to start modifying the mechanical or electrical design or construction of an item, because I feel that it wasn't done right in the first place. Certainly, the addition of the odd cable tie, or adding a shakeproof washer to a screw head, is something I would do. Such 'missing' items are often as a result of a cost cutting exercise by the manufacturer, and do not alter the electrical or mechanical safety specs in any detrimental way. However, I am absolutely against making any major mechanical or electrical changes to a piece of equipment, that are not specified as required changes in a manufacturer bulletin. I am not a designer, and what I see as a 'design issue', may well have been done that way in order to make the equipment comply with some safety regulation, that I know nothing about. If I see a number of a 'young' product with a specific design or manufacturing flaw, I will probably contact the manufacturer to let them know, but if I see a twenty year old amplifier with an issue, then I am not going to start questioning the designer's philosophy, and working up mods to make it like I would want to see it.

I actually find a lot of what Mr Cook posts about, quite interesting, and I admire his tenacity and ingenuity at finding fixes for some problems, but as a fellow professional, I do have a lot of difficulty with the way he apparently tackles some customer jobs, and whilst I'm sure that most if not all of the professional repairers on here understand where he's coming from, I'm not sure that it is right that amateurs learning from repair threads on here, should see some of his fixes as the 'proper' way to do the job, and the way that a commercial repairer would go about it ...

Still, as you say, 'nuff said. Perhaps I'm wrong in all this, and just being a boring old pedant ... d;~}

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily

I'm a firm believer in "if it ain't broke , don't poke".

I forgot to mention 2 points, 1 on each side of the competing procedural time/costs equation. I also tapped the 2x 1.5mm holes with 8BA threads for the screws. v there is a silly powered gizmo on the display casing that you'd have to pay for also . Even then I'm assuming its phenolic ribbon supply has a socket receiver inside the gizmo, not soldered in place, as its all very thin, probably fixed in place. If so then replacement full LCD + inverter, many way, replacement ribbon as well.

Reply to
N_Cook

What gets to me is when well meaning people start modifying customers equipment without a thought to the damage they might be doing to the value or safety.

If I took my treasured vintage 1960`s Marshall amp to a repair shop for a simple input socket replacement, and the 'engineer' proudly told me that he'd improved it by boring holes through the circuit board and modifying the sockets with shoelaces, soldered in a few extra fuses, or rewired the preamp valves in teflon coated silver plated superwire, glued the valves in with bath sealer and added a few extra ventilation holes in the case, I might start thinking about suing for compensation.

Even a non standard fuse holder or voltage selector can reduce the value of some collectable amps by quite a lot, and tinkering with the lay of internal wiring can destroy that vintage sound.

On commercial gear like that, there should be no reason why a proper lasting repair can`t be carried out using professional methods and the proper parts. Anyone not prepared to do the job properly shouldn`t be doing the job at all. (IMO)

Ron

Reply to
Ron

I hope your repair goes well and outlasts the usefulness of the laptop.

All part of business of repair. You should know that after your years of repair and reading SER.

Reply to
Meat Plow

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.