Notebook restoration

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Hello.

In this post i’ll show a quick walk-trough on how I managed to re-use an old Asus A6RP that had a sad ending.
In a few words, the entire case got smashed to plastic splinters. Luckily the internal components survived.
The case was rebuilt around two 4mm transparent acrylic sheets and 2.5mm pcb stand-offs, 10 and 15mm tall.

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The main board is sandwiched between the two acrylic sheets, using the stand-offs to support the entire weight.
The stand-offs almost fitted the mother board’s holes, but where were ~ 0.5mm larger so I had to drill out all the holes with a 2.5mm drill. This was possible because of the way the PCB is built: the designers left a 1.5mm unused PCB ring around each hole, the only vias around the bare pcb ring are GND to GND. Also the holes are not plated trough.

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After that, all I had to do was to line up the main board on the acrylic sheets and drill holes to insert 2.5mm screws trough the stand-offs

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The LCD is mounted in the same way – using the brackets that were used to secure it in the old case. The CCFL inverter board was fixed with some sticky-tape. I had to create a hole in the acrylic sheet to route the LVDS and inverter cables.

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This is finished assembly:

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The speakers and wireless antenna were mounted with double sticky tape between the acrylic sheets.
The CPU cooler is mounted on some acrylic shards with cyano glue.
As a bonus, the battery still fits in it’s proper place.

The next step will be to find and install a monitor stand off and some rubber foam to secure the battery

Category: Electronica | Tags: , ,
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