Disassembly Guides

Damaging your iPod or iPhone can be an expensive accident. If you have insurance on your phone then by all means, you’re covered. If however, you are like most people out there and do not insure their phones, there are a few options you can take. You can send your device in to an iPhone repair shop or you can order the replacement parts in and perform a DIY install. For those opting the DIY route, I strongly suggest that you familiarise yourself with the procedure by searching on Youtube or google for disassembly instructions on your iPhone or iPod before proceeding. We also recommend that you take your time and do not rush the installation process. We have seen many times before when customers rush a repair job and come back with to us to get other replacement mobile phone parts they have broken during the process. The main aim here for doing a DIY install is to save money and if you’re breaking additional parts, you’re defeating the whole purpose in the first place.

Common repair jobs we see by far are broken touch screens/digitizers and broken LCD screens. The digitizer (or glass touch screen panel) is the glass part of the screen that detects inputs from your fingers and used for navigation purposes. The digitizer sits on top of your LCD screen. The LCD screen is the part that displays the images of your phone and has a backlight. A good way to determine what is broken is to look at your screen. Is the LCD bleeding or has large black blobs? If the answer is yes, then your LCD screen needs replacing. If it is working fine and is just the glass touch screen that is broken, then you will only need to replace the digitizer. On a side note, some devices such as the iPod Touch 4th generation and iPhone 4, both the LCD and digitizer are glued together by a strong adhesive and cannot be separated. This means you will need to replace both at the same time regardless of what is broken. Again, we encourage that you do some research (or contact us) to make sure you don’t get duped into purchasing useless parts as we have seen some unethical busienss practices going around.

For water damaged phones, we don’t recommend repairing these as the price will usually escalate to make it non feasible. We don’t recommend that you open up your phone and instead, we have heard that Apple replace water damaged phones for $250 (even if it is not functioning) so that would be a better option for you.

When you’re going ahead with the DIY install, ensure you are working in a clean, dust free environment. The last thing you want is annoying white specks of dust underneath your digitizer glass touch screen after reinstalling the replacement glass. Just give it a wipe with a lint free cloth before installing and you should be good to go. While you’re at it and your iPod or iPhone has been taken apart, you may want to consider also replacing your iPod battery at this stage to save you time and having to disassemble your device again in the future. This is especially true if you’re noticing a fall in battery life/operating times. We stock a range of replacement batteries for your iPod and iPhone.

If it all too difficult for a self install, here at Circuit Central, we do offer iPhone and iPod repair service to ensure the job is done right.

An important note to remember is that the iPod touch 4th gen LCD and digitizer are both glued together by a strong adhesive and replacing them separately or separating them is not possible. We’ve seen some sellers offering the digitizer or LCD separately (and they shouldn’t), so be aware that regardless if the LCD screen or glass touch panel is broken, both will require replacing.

This one is not too difficult to install, but there is one step that is a little tricky…reconnecting the digitizer ribbon cable as it is located underneath the main board.

You can remove the entire board as shown in the video to make this step a little easier, but from experience, this is not necessary as a good set of tweezers will make life alot easier. Also when reinstalling the screen assembly back into the main frame (the last step), I found heating up the whole iPod touch with a heatgun or hairdryer again creates a better seal as it softens the adhesive surface.

Tools Required:
Heatgun or hairdryer
Anti-Static Tweezers
Non scratch iPod prying tools (or a guitar pick also works)

Parts Required:
iPod Touch 4G LCD screen assembly

Here’ s a video of the HTC di

sassembly used by HTC themselves! Video says its for a HTC “Bravo”, but this is just the name of the device sold overseas. It is identical to the Desire sold locally here in Australia. Its quite detailed and you only really need to go up to 4:50 if you are looking to replace a cracked screen or touch panel.

Parts required:
HTC Desire LCD Screen
and/or
HTC Desire Glass Touch Panel

Tools required:
Torx T5 Screwdriver
Tweezers
Small phillips head screwdriver (00×40)

The PS3′s internal controller battery is a wear and tear item and all those hours of playing COD has finally taken its toll and the PS3 controller is no longer holding its charge. Instead of buying a new sixaxis controller, it is much more economical to simply replace the internal battery at a fraction of the cost of a new controller.

Apparantly Sony has provided instructions on how to replace the internal battery in the PS3 user manual. But the question is where can these replacement batteries be purchased? Sony hasn’t really provided an answer for this. We offer a high quality replacement PS3 controller battery, backed with a 12 month warranty. Simply open up your controller by following the instructions outlined in the user manual, unplug the old battery, replace with the new and re-assemble.