Mi Problema
Broken Screen
Mi Solución
I appreciate your giving me the opportunity to discuss the progress of my repair with you.
I gather that the time required for a fairly skilled technician to perform this task – replacing the screen on an iPhone 4S is about an hour or so. After about eight hours I have now managed to get the phone re-assembled and working – in a manner of speaking. I have been able to navigate around the interface somewhat and successfully make phone calls. There remain three or four issues which are unacceptable.
I should begin by saying that the duration of my job was due to no small degree by mishaps arising from my physical limitations. Firstly, I am 72 years old and have rather large hands with a bit of a tremor, and found it hard to manipulate some of the screws even with tweezers. Often they would pop from my hands, and even though I was working on a doubly-confined tray with doubly-adhesive layout map, the Brownian movement seemed enough to make them arc onto the carpet, where it would take half an hour to find them again. This is practically a clean-room job.
My old eyes are not the best, either. I did most of the work with reading glasses and a Bausch-Lomb 3x loupe. But, without a 10x compound jeweler’s loupe I could scarcely distinguish the smallest Phillip’s head from the Pentalobe head. I am still not convinced that my authentic Pentalobe drive had a symmetrical foliate form. Often it seemed that only one orientation in 360 degrees would function, and that only with a lot of force. This was to have later consequences, as it turned out.
I would say there was one source of confusion in the several instruction videos I consulted. This has to do with the pair of doubly-tapped screws or “two screws in one place”. It took a bit to for me to catch onto the fact that one screw hade a female tapping in its own head to receive the male that was screwed in from above. This lead to another problem, I think, as I will get to near the end of my narrative.
Reading over the experiences of other DIY adventurers, I noticed that a couple of them complained about a new “Home” button not being provided with the screen. I was forewarned when it came time to recover the original Home button from the wreckage of d old screen. As delicately as possible, I pulled the black tape holding it to the back of the old panel, and the two pieces immediately fell apart from each other. It seems that the original adhesive was crumbly and unsuitable for attaching it to the new screen. There were bosses on both the molded tape and the plastic button, so the orientation seemed clear enough.
But how to re-affix the old tape and button (no new ones having been supplied)? It looked like plastic electrical tape and a plastic button. I was almost done, I thought. Surely a little Borden’ rubber cement would do the job. Wrong. As soon as the cement hit the tape, it shriveled up. Working furiously, I managed to get it oriented. It seemed firm enough. [Fast forward to power up test…] Wrong. It was loose, danced around, and seemed not to produce the proper response, except by chance. But at least the phone lighted up and I could dial out.
I had put in a new battery, and every thing else seemed tickety-boo. So I decided to close up the phone. ALAS. I had one Pentalobe screw left and one Phillips, almost the right size. Also I noticed that the vibrator did not work.
So, I think here is where things stand. I’ll have to open it up again. Perhaps I put the missing Pentalobe into the flange that holds down the vibrator. Swap this with the incorrect Philips in the frame. Maybe – just maybe – that’ll kill two birds with one stone. Then I have to figure out the correct way to secure the Home button.
There are other problems seeming to have to do with the fact that I swapped SIMs with another iPhone 4, but that’s probably just software stuff. It is also tricky to make sure the backups don’t get confused.
So, I guess I’m about 75-8% done and still mildly optimistic.
~Nemo Oudeheis
oudeheis(AT)gmail.com
Mi Consejo
Even the map was not enough. Triple check the provenance and identity of every component.
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