domarius

Remove the washers and place them with the screws, don’t leave them on the board, you’ll be removing it later and you don’t want to have them slide off.

When lifting it out, it seemed to be affixed to something at the far bottom right corner (relative to the above photo), and required a bit of tugging before popping free, which was a bit alarming. Not sure where it was stuck. Was definitely lifting it away from the base first before lifting too far up.

Also this is a good point to be reminded not to lose the little battery washers from earlier (step 3) if you decided to be smart and leave them on the board! Remove them and place them with the screws.

TIP for correcting misaligned strips before it’s too late: OK, after laying the battery down on the ends before rolling them around to the other side (as others have described) - it’s good to try and visually align the adhesive before you start pressing down. Nevertheless, if you start pressing them down slowly, and notice they are going on an angle (and therefore, will continue off the side of the battery instead of heading to the top), you can “course correct” by lifting up the other end of the plastic film off the already adhered end of the strips, till only the adhesive itself is loosely holding the film to the phone. Then you can change the angle of the whole thing, BUT only by stretching one side of the strips, not crumpling the other side. Stretching is better because crumpling will add 1mm of thickness which may impact the phone closing properly and give you pressure points on the screen!

I don’t know why the instructions didn’t mention this, but I pulled it to the left and back, like the previous strip, rather than straight back, to avoid snapping.

Another thing - These cables can become overlapped in the wrong way and make you think they are in a different order than they should be. Eg. it’s easy to mix up the ones from step 15 and 17. You can actually unravel the cables and re-layer them on top of each other in any order, so remember this! They look like they’re one solid mass but they’re not.

What’s not mentioned is there is a little arm on that bracket - so as you should slide it to the right to remove it, you also have to slide it left as you put it back in. If you don’t, it doesn’t sit properly, and when you screw in the 4.2mm screw, the bracket will buckle inwards. That’s how you know it’s not inserted properly.

I’ve done this twice and still cannot understand why we are removing the speaker before removing the antenna on top of it. It gets in the way, and again when you reverse the instructions when you put the antenna on first and then the speaker… I’ve been swapping those steps instead.

Clearly to channel the sound neatly from the outside to the inside of the case with no interference - muffling due to something being in the way, or vibrating of the case direct contact with the mic with nothing to absorb the shock. The mic is very tiny, when you’re working with parts this small, this stuff matters. The clarity of audio you’ve come to expect on phone calls doesn’t happen by magic.

Call me crazy, but can’t I just use a thin strip of blu-tack?

The connector seemed a bit raised after re-assembling, I noticed after pressing the bracket down on in preparation for screwing in. I don’t know if it’s normal for it to have a slightly raised feeling but it was noticeable. Enough to make me wonder if it’s too much pressure on it once it’s screwed together.