Last Friday, one of our friends brought her old Dell laptop in and asked if we could fix it, because it wouldn't close. So we looked at it, and the tab holding the screen to the hinge had popped free of the little pop-rivets holding it, and the hinge wasn't turning when the screen moved. And the hinge was _very_ stiff.
So I drilled out the pop-rivets, stuck the tab in place with a whole mess of epoxy and let it dry overnight. Then I re-drilled the holes where the pop-rivets and screws were. A little spray of food-grade silicone loosened the seized hinge a little bit, and 4 machine screws with nuts re-attached the newly re-tabbed screen to the hinge. I cut off the excess length of the screws, but the cover wouldn't go over them, so we lopped off the corner of the cover. She said she only wants the computer to last through her first semester of grad school. So no worries. But I kinda like the whole "industrial" look...
stock hinge:
alex-justin-and-michael-ized hinge:
6 comments:
What a great guy, to spend so much time for a friend!!
nicely done. isn't it interesting how many little things are made to last just long enough that the rest of the product outlasts them? it seems that in this price-competitive age it becomes harder and harder to make things last because they don't make 'em like they used to.
to joseph,
Yes planned obsolescence has reached an all time high.
@insanity: Actually in the case of computers it's not so much planned obsolescence as expected obsolescence. Moore's law dictates that the number of transistors you can fit on a fixed area of silicon doubles every 18 months. That means that every 18 months, computers have either gotten twice as fast, or twice as cheap, or some mixture of the two. Knowing this, most manufacturers don't go too far out of their way to make cases etc... that will last more than 3 or 4 years because the computer will be obsolete by then simply because of advances in technology.
pictures would have been better with big smiles. hehe.
It's so great to have a fix it man around......by the by, the next time you are up could you look at my computer and .............
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