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Shattered

jrgomez -

My Problem

My best friend and I bought our iPad 3 4G's at the same time. My friend started dating a girl so I hadn't seen him in a couple of months. I ran into him one night and he let me know that he had dropped his iPad and was very upset about it. I was too after seeing the picture he took of it. He dropped it getting out of his car. It was in a padded slip case and it didn't drop far but hit right on the corner as you'll see in the picture. He didn't think it could be fixed by the likes of us but I reminded him that i'd taken plenty of (successful) risks with iPods, a MacBookPro and several other computers, but never an iPad. I told him about iFixit but he had doubts. I did some research and told him it would run about $150 to fix the front panel. Well worth it to quit cutting his fingers and having to relive the experience everyday. He agreed so I ordered the tools and display from iFixit.

My Fix

The repair was tedious and slow because the display was falling apart in tiny pieces. We finally hit a point where we got a good chunk so to make it heat up faster we used a hair dryer along with the iOpener. We didn't have any problems after that. We used an Xacto knife ,(very carefully) and iFixit tweezers to get off the remainder of adhesive and little bits of glass. We also used a small vacuum cleaner to keep the work area clean. Heat was the most important tool we had. We had to be careful though not to over heat the iPad and damage it. Its a fine line between not enough heat and too much. Before adhering the display we hooked it up and lined it up to make sure it worked. It didn't. We were about 5 hrs. in so we waited overnight to troubleshoot. I reached out to the help forum on iFixit and got some advice to hold down the lock button for about 15 seconds then plug in the iPad to power and it should boot up. It didn't boot so I thought maybe a hard reset by holding the lock button and the home button for about 15 seconds and then plug it in, that did it! I was so happy to see my friends eyes light up when the white apple showed up on the screen. We tested everything from a list we found on a video on YouTube. Everything worked fine so we stuck the display on, heated the tape a bit and put a couple big books on it overnight. It was well worth the time we put into it.

My Advice

We felt like the day we got our iPads in the mail, there is still a little chip on the aluminum housing but we filed it down very carefully with a very fine file. The beauty of that new display took our eyes away from it. The best advice I could give would be first and foremost heat! Then, patience and plenty of time. If we would have realized the importance of direct heat on the edges we could have cut our work time by quite a bit. 2 heads and 4 hands really helped! You may also want to replace the bevel depending on the severity of the break. It was a difficult task but the reward is well worth it! Thank you iFixit for saving my ) ) one more time!

iPad 3/4 Screen Digitizer Image
iPad 3/4 Screen Digitizer

$24.99

iPad 3/4 Adhesive Strips Image
iPad 3/4 Adhesive Strips

$6.99

Spudger Image
Spudger

$3.99

Phillips #00 Screwdriver Image
Phillips #00 Screwdriver

$5.49

iOpener Image
iOpener

$19.99

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