aphor's Journal: I replaced my 667 Gigabit TiBook LCD. OW!

The problem:
I am a very demanding user, and titanium is brittle. I have had my TiBook since they released the first DVI TiBook. I blew about $3K altogether with the Airport, tax, and shipping. I take it with me almost everywhere. About the only time I leave it home are for short errands and entertainment. Stupid airport security guards at the x-ray machines manhandled it and put dents in the bottom tray just below the lid release. My backpack, slung with one strap across my back, slipped off when I bent over to tie my shoe once. The padded sleeve did little to mitigate the corner impact from about 12 inches up. The titanium bottom catch snapped off. Past warranty, I opened it up and fixed it with a piece of metal ruler and epoxy. The plastic frame glued to the bottom pan of the laptop housing is even more brittle than titanium. I had to superglue it then and several times since. The last drop was only about 6 inches, but it slightly bent the hinges and skewed the lid. The constant strain began to crack the titanium outside frame at the ports. One of the hinge covers needed to be bent back, but fatigued and broke. I epoxied it for cosmetic effect. Worst of all, the LCD started flickering and would freeze with various symptoms: badly interlaced partial image, blue and red vertical lines in some places, horizontal bands, and garbled corners that looked like a decoded damaged JPEG.

The Solution:
I cried to my wife, who coldly said $2K is too much money to spend on a new AlBook. I went to to Google looking for parts: $1000 for a raw LCD panel. The disassembly/reassembly is a very painstaking process. Labor: $500. Ouch! I found some web sites with instructions and pictures:

• Onyx (667) TiBook PB fixit guide
• macdan's TiBook LCD bezel removal technique
• sysop powerbook step-by-step disassembly

Back to EBay, I found a guy in Texas with a "grade A" refurb LCD panel at $259 "buy-it-now". I bought it. I followed macdan's method with good results: only a couple of small dents. When the LCD arrived at the local UPS store, it was in a factory box packed with less than 1 inch soft open-cell eggcrate foam on the top and bottom. The box showed crush damage on one edge. It came with a sheet of thick clear PE (like transparency film, but heavier) taped to it to protect the pristine LCD screen. I pulled it off and glued it back on with dots of hot melt glue at the corners. I was prepared for the worst, but after four hours of gruelling hardware work, I had everything plugged in, test-bench style, and it worked perfectly.

I got some Gorilla Glue for the reassembly. When I got everything back in place, I had too much glue on the LCD bezel. A thin bead of this stuff is too much. At about 60 minutes of drying time, the partially thickened resin starts foaming and squeezed out of every crack. It cured much more solid than the factory glue job though, judging by the stiffened flexibility of the reassembled LCD. I recommend this glue wholeheartedly, but macdan's technique will probably not work on Gorilla Glue, so make sure you get it right the first time! Also, if you use this glue, I recommend applying it in droplets spaced 1/4 inch apart with a hypodermic syringe. Also, put some paper down on the edge f your table/bench, and hang the laptop over the edge, screen on the tabletop, and put paper and then something rigid like plywood or masonite on top of the screen so that the weight of the toolboxes or books you stack on top is transferred to the edges of the screen (where the glue is) and not the delicate part of the screen.

After seeing results the next morning, I was romanced again by the crisp, bright screen. The world was better again, for a while, and then I adjusted the tilt of the screen. The goofy display problems were back (except for the predictable vertical lines from the old display). I figured out that it was the overly delicate LCD data cable harness on the bottom of the system board near the left hinge. I rerouted the LED cable to the groove cut in the system board for the port cover hinge spring. Then I cleaned the contacts with solvent and a can of air, and tucked a small strip of paper into the top of the system board jack so that the fit was more snug, and the paper prevented the wires from contacting the bottom pan when reassembled. This helped, but there was still too much flexion in the frame around this wiring harness. I loosened the screws and torqued them down with the screen fully opened, gently twisting the frame holding the ports backwards. This prestressed the bottom pan, and now nothing presses on the LCD cable connectors. Defects gone!

BTW: I knew the defects were a bad wire connection because I recognised "clock jitter" symptoms in the screen that got worse as the TiBook got hot from use. Pushing on the bottom of the laptop would fix the connection long enough for the LCD to get a good clock and the screen would refresh before going bad again. Pins toward the power connector seem to carry the horizontal and vertical clock signals. Pins away from the power connector seem to carry pixel chromatic data.