Posted by rayui on July 18, 2011
So… in the process of installing a larger hard disk drive in my father’s Macbook Pro I accidentally split the frame surrounding the screen. God knows how, I was dead careful and didn’t hear it go at all. Anyway, after the initial horror, blame, counter-blame and acceptance session, it was time to come up with a viable solution to patch the thing back together. Taking inspiration from a technique outlined in Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, I went on the hunt for likely sources of aluminium with which to patch the damaged frame back together. Pirsig recommends beer cans; I found a can of Coca Cola in the garage which would perform the job just as well. A further short hunt around the tool boxes turned up some Araldite metal cement… my tools were now in hand. What follows is a short photo documentary of the process of the true art of engineering – making broken things work again. The final result, as you will see, is not at all bad.
My work was aided invaluably by these instructions from iFixIt, a brilliant general hacker resource.
Macbook Pro in pieces
Coke can shim in front of split Macbook LCD panel
Coke can shim applied to Macbook LCD panel
Macbook Pro happily back together post surgery. The split on the bottom left hand corner of the display is almost invisible.
Posted by rayui on March 13, 2011
So, it’s spring and that means time for new stuff. This weekend I have been on a domestic rampage. My previously extremely unergonomic pit of a bedroom has now been transformed into a much more pleasant space. I threw away loads old clothes and securely disposed of (i.e. with fire) five years’ worth of useless paperwork. Then I moved the bed to the back of the room in the centre, which leaves me with a nice usable area at the front. Jack Dove (creator of the lightboxes The XX use, http://jackdove.bigcartel.com/) came over to help me put up some new shelves. He is very good at manual stuff and can make almost anything physical. We used 5″ wood screws to drill straight through to the 2×4 wooden structure under the plasterboard, which we found by knocking on the wall and listening for the change in echo. The rails and brackets came from Screwfix, around the corner.
Heartened by our success with the shelves, I decided that I could really set off my new bedside with some kind of table for potential books, phones and glasses of water. No more reaching over the side of the bed and knocking pint glasses over in the middle of the night; a revelation. I took a palette from the street and cut down a spare piece of MDF with a rather terrifying heavy duty circular saw in the workshop. I then used two 5″ wood screws and an electric drill with a screwdriver bit to screw one into the other. Here is the result:
I’m very pleased with it. The back is hollow and set away from the wall by about 3 cm, leaving space for pipes and the concealment of electrical sockets for a lamp and phone charger. It is functional and (I think) aesthetic. More importantly, it was very easy to make.
