jason.green.io
Project: FrankenBook
As many of you know, I used to own a 466 MHz clamshell iBook SE which I sold to Lynie. The poor laptop has been thru alot, it’s battery died a few months back so I ordered a new batttery for it.. then the yo-yo AC adapter died (all of them do eventually), so I found one at Ivan’s. Meanwhile, it’s underside was starting to peel off due to heat.
The poor thing had 9 lives, it’s down to .. I’d say .. 3 now. Last week it’s modem died. So Lynie brought it to Ivan’s Camera (they sell Macs) to troubleshoot, they wanted to reinstall the OS or something so she asked me to backup her data.. knowing I could troublshoot better than they could, I attacked the problem.. booted off various OSs and noticed the modem would not run in any of them. Harware issue, end of subject. I begin surgery on the suffering piece of technology, using this site.
I notice the modem isn’t seated properly so I pushed it in and reassembled.. at that point I was eager to try it out. I was impatient in putting it back together which caused me to rip the trackpad cable in two. Crap. I plug in a mouse, try the modem, still no go. Double Crap.
I tell this to Paul, the Ivan’s Camera Mac guy.. he agrees it’s a hardware problem and suggests I fix it myself by buying an old 333MHz iBook that has a bad LCD and use it for parts. So Lyne buys the thing, and I begin an adventure.
So the plan was to transfer Lyne’s iBook innards to the old iBook’s case, use the old iBook’s modem and drill a hole in the old iBook’s case for the FireWire port (original iBooks didn’t come with FireWire).
I start by taking the old one apart.
Then Lynie’s
Then I had to get the old base ready for Roz’s dremel…
…by marking where the firewire port is supposed to be.
After a quick trip to Roz’s I get back and complete the work, I transfer the old guts into the old case.. or the new case.. or is it.. anyway, I moved stuff around and ended up with this:
I like the extra translucency of the old style case. I also kept the old keyboard, looks better than the other one.. so anyway.. this is how the dremel work ended up:
For anyone attempting to do this .. don’t, save up for a shiny new iBook or 12″ PowerBook.