Re: Early Voyager display access Message #8 Posted by Mark Edmonds on 21 June 2009, 11:39 a.m., in response to message #7 by Randy
Right, well this has been done now and appears to have been successful. However, it wasn't without a major heart-stopping moment and only time will tell whether that turns out to be a problem or not.
A few points to note:
1. The pictures I found elsewhere which showed an 11C being opened with the internals attached to the back half of the case were rather misleading. When you undo the screws and take the thing apart, the internals are attached to the top half of the case and the back half comes off cleanly.
2. When removing the pastic envelope, I found that there was a slab of double-sided adhesive foam between the PCB and the envelope. This slab was nearly as wide as the PCB and about 1.5cm on the other axis. Obviously, this made opening the pastic envelope rather difficult and no matter how slowly and how carefully I did it, I couldn't help have a couple of small sections of foam detach.
3. There are two little springs you need to keep an eye on when removing the back. The longer one goes near the battery pack and the shorter on the right hand side as you look at the back of the calc.
4. To remove the main board and display section, I pulled off the four white "washers" that sat on the mounting pins and then removed the battery connectors. After that, it was a case of carefully lifting up the assembly keeping it parallel to the mounting pins and without putting too much strain on the flexi connecter area.
5. And this is when I had a horrible moment when I thought I had totally killed the machine. As I was lifting up the display assembly, the connecting area between this and the keyboard suddenly pinged loose leaving a strange looking connector on the display side. On the keyboard side, the pcb was completely clean with no sign of where this had attached. The only connectors I am familiar with have nice solid male/female mating so this strange thing looked broken to me and I couldn't see what hope in hell I had of lining it up again, yet alone fixing it back on the pcb.
6. Convinced I had killed the calc, I proceeded to clean everything up and pop the front glass back into its groove. Then I put it all back together again apart from the back case, stuck the batteries in and tried to operate it.
7. Nothing. Yep - killed it so I thought. However, I pushed down on where this connecter appeared to have broken and much to my huge relief, the keys started working and I could complete calculations.
8. I had intended to do much more cleaning but after this event, I thought I had better quit whilst ahead so put the screws back in and tidied up.
Thankfully, everything still appears to be OK. All the keys are working so whether that connector will be troublesome in the future or not, who knows.
Anyway, I've now got a better machine than I had but not as immaculately clean as I was wanting to achieve. Maybe another day.
Thanks again for all the help and advice that gave me the confidence to tackle this process.
Mark
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