Do It Yourself Repairs for a TiBook Advice

[indigoflowAS]

So the flaw that I feared from day one is starting to take shape...the dreaded hinge problem of the TiBook era.

My hinges are still in good shape, but i can feel them starting to get loose *wiggles display* very loose, and i feel that if it gets jarred too badly, something will break.

the screws that seem to be failing or getting loose are not the ones that are exposed, but seem to be inside, under all the guts and logic board inside the TiBook. I am not interested in sending it to apple and have them shaft me for like $300 service charge, i am not sure how easy it is to do it myself. I stumbled across a guide for display repair at http://www.pbfixit.com/cart/catalog/...but all i need is to tighten the hinges before they break.

any help is most welcome. thanks.

 

[dblissmn]

It's pretty easy

. . . you need the correct hex screw for getting the covers off. Unfortunately I no longer have my TiBook, as I traded it in at Powermax in giddy anticipation of the new Powerbooks (and getting a healthy trade in price for it), only to discover all the bugs on the new 15 inch Powerbook with the result that I seem headed towards getting a 12 incher as a replacement . . . . so I can't recall what size screws the TiBook uses.

But suffice to say, you remove the covers to find another portcullis of screws (again, pretty standard but two are hex and two are Phillips if I recall correctly), and you can tighten them, loosen them, adjust them, align them, pretty much whatever; it's amazingly adjustable. Or just lubricate the hinges using an appropriate kit. Just be sure to be careful with the data cable leading to the screen, which fits around the under-structure in a primitive, Rube Goldberg kind of way. And make sure you don't OVERTIGHTEN the hinges . . . . there's a part in there that is aluminum rather than steel or titanium or carbon fiber as it should be, so brittleness can catch up with you if there is too much strain.

The great thing about the TiBook is how easy it is to work on, leaving aside the issue of the upper part of the hinge itself being sandwiched between the two (glued AND screwed) halves of the display casing. The current Powerbooks have better keyboards and stronger hinges, but at a fearsome price for DIY; making the hinge secure and the keyboard rigid seems to have involved removing all visible means of entrance and exit into the computer itself, with the result that the number of screws involved goes up by a factor of about ten.

Hope this helps

 

[California]

Yeah, diy on the hinges. You know, i spared my Tibook hinges because I don't open and shut them a lot. in fact, barely and rarely shut them at all -- maybe if we were going somewhere. But previous poster is right == they are scary easy to work on yourself.

 

[wattage]

I was wondering if ya'll knew which part of the TiBooks were actually made of Titanium? I think I remember hearing that only a small piece or part was made of said material.

 

[Marky_Mark]

I was wondering if ya'll knew which part of the TiBooks were actually made of Titanium? I think I remember hearing that only a small piece or part was made of said material.

The titanium part! Heh, heh!

Sorry... ....I couldn't resist

 

[wattage]

nice Set up like a bowling pin, knocked down.

 

[California]

Tibooks have plastic frames around the topcase edges of the titanium body. the top back of the LCD, the LCD frame, the main part of the topcase/palmrest and trackpad and bottom case are all Titanium. I believe I heard this material was just too expensive to keep making PBs out of it. The one thing that bugs me about Albooks is not that they pit and corrode on the palm rests -- the analogous problem on Tibooks is that the Titanium was painted, so very vulnerable to scratches -- but that the Albooks, like aluminum, actually bend. This weirds me out. Tibooks would have problems like all pbs, with the hinges and latches and scratches and their plastic frames would break if you banged them up in a certain way, but at least they didn't bend, making them wavy on the desktop. My two or three cents.

 

[zach]

Radtech (www.radtech.us) sells a very nice kit for tightening/adjusting the TiBook's hinges. Fixed my friend's TiBook that had the very same problem, I recommend you check it out.

 

[alex_ant]

The plastic frames on the TiBooks are actually carbon fiber, which is different. I don't think the small amount of titanium they used in the thing was too expensive (Apple did make a $1000 profit off the high end models, after all). The rev A TiBooks did flex considerably, but this was reduced in later models. All in all, I think titanium turned out to be a bad idea in a laptop.