separating LCD from glass/digitizer on phone

[mayo_capone]

Despite swearing it would never happen to me, I've gone and broken the glass screen on my droid DNA. I didn't really break it, some charging monster of a woman in the Hogsmead area of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter barged into me and sent it flying, but what is done is done. After a few stiff butter beers I got over the initial shock.

So my options are buy a refurb phone from Verizon for $300, pay $220 to have a third party repair it, pay $150 for the LCD/digitizer combo and do it myself, or pay $25 for the digitizer and somehow pry the working LCD from the broken glass screen so I can reuse it.

Being slightly nuts and very cheap, I bought the digitizer despite a lot of warnings out there about the difficulty in not destroying the old LCD when liberating it from the broken digitizer. Well I'm not just some schmoe who's gonna point a hair dryer at the screen until the glue melts, I'm a semi industrious chemist with access to some potentially glue dissolving solvents and also very precisely controlled ovens.

So I'm wondering if anyone would speculate on whether methanol, ethanol, ipa, hexane, or chloroform would be lcd safe. Or should I just skip the solvents and put the screen in an oven and ramp the temp 5 degrees C at a time until they separate?

 

[Crono]

Pure IPA is safe. Almost always safe to use around electronics - avoid using it directly on electrical components like capacitors whenever possible, obviously - so long as there isn't a charge (keep battery and power cable disconnected).

I've used in laptops without issue for cleaning residue. Just avoid using too much - I king of like using the wipes used for lens cleaning, but swabs with high purity would work just as well or better.

 

[pm]

I've separated the glass from a digitizer on a couple of phones where this was thought to be next-to-impossible. It all went back together and everything looked great. I would opt for the heat method - which is what I used - but I used a heat gun. But that's tough too because the LCD doesn't want too much heat either. My best advice is to just take it slow and careful and if you feel like you are getting annoyed then take a break. I used a heat gun and an exacto knife and then gently twisted the knife blade after I started to get them to separate. Also, watch out for dust before you put it all back together so have a bottle of that "Dust Off" stuff.

 

[Chocu1a]

Heat gun method works best. I think ovens might damage other components in the process.

 

[Hunt3rj2]

If you're going to give a shot, I sure hope you have a clean-room. You have to either figure out how to dissolve the epoxy without damaging the rest of the panel or apply even heat to the glass to melt the epoxy without melting the phone.

After that you have to either reheat the epoxy and use that to put a new digitizer on it or you have to epoxy the screen yourself.

I would suggest contacting a website like ETradeSupply to really get the details on how to do this if you can actually find the proper tools to pull this off.