Fix a Broken Laptop Hinge with a Soldering Iron

Overview

I picked up a laptop on eBay for $35—an AMD A8 quad-core with 4GB of RAM. Great deal, except for two problems: the CD drive wasn’t being detected, and the LCD hinge was completely broken with the standoff nuts ripped out of the plastic base. In this video, I show you how I fixed both issues, with a focus on the clever soldering iron technique that saved the hinge.

Key Moments

• Diagnosing the loose ribbon cable that prevented CD drive detection
• Opening the entire laptop to reseat the daughter card connector
• Discovering broken hinge standoffs ripped from the plastic base
• Using a soldering iron to melt the nuts back into the plastic
• Holding nuts in place with pliers and tweezers during melting
• Testing the repair by screwing the hinge back in
• Successfully restoring both CD drive functionality and hinge operation

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hello everybody, tonight I’m working on a laptop. I bought this laptop online on eBay for 35 bucks. It’s got an AMD A8 quad-core CPU and it came with 4 gigs of RAM. It’s a pretty nice machine. It actually happens to run Windows XP and Windows 10, and I’m going to make a dual boot system out of it.

But as I was playing with it, I noticed a couple of things. I first noticed that the CD drive was not being detected. In order to fix that, what I ended up having to do was opening up the entire laptop like this, because this ribbon cable right here—let me get a closer look for you—this ribbon cable that goes from this little daughter card was loose.

This CD ROM slides in from the side. What it does is when it slides in, the optical drive has these SATA connectors, and it slides into this connector on this other side. I thought that just by reseating it in and out I could get it to work, but it didn’t. I ended up having to open up the entire machine. It turns out that this was just slightly out, and by taking it out and putting it back in, the CD ROM started to be detected by the computer. So that problem is fixed.

However, while I was in here, I realized that this laptop has another issue, which is this hinge over here on the LCD is broken. The little standoffs or the little nuts—these little nuts that are supposed to be inside the plastic on the base—have been ripped off. Sometimes that happens when, during the course of the life of the laptop, you open and close the lid many, many times and some people are not as gentle. Somebody must have grabbed it and yanked it off in a way that lifted up this side.

You can see here on the other side the standoffs are still embedded in the plastic and this hinge is perfectly fine. Now, in order to fix this one, what I have going on here is I have started to preheat up this soldering iron with a flat tip. What I plan to do here is I’m going to take apart these little nuts—the bottom part—and I’ve done this before where I just let the little nut lay on top of the hole where it’s supposed to go, and then with the soldering iron I melt the nut back into the base. That tends to work really well.

Let me see if I can actually do that with this machine and hopefully I will have a working hinge.

Alright, so here we are. As you can see here, the carnage is pretty big. I have some plastic pieces right here that have come off. You can see here the little pieces, and then this little guy is supposed to go down here. So I’m going to do that. I’m going to put that down here and I think I’m going to—okay, let me just try that, see what happens. Heat it up. Okay, that one is back in there. Alright, so one down. That is melted in there.

Okay, now I’ve got to do the other ones. Now the other one is in place and now I’m going to heat it up so that it melts into the hole again. Okay, that’s melting in. Perfect. Melt this plastic on the side here—you don’t want to breathe this stuff in. Alright, place your bets if that’s going to align. Who knows?

Now the last one—I have to take the other one and put it back in. This is how I’m doing it: I hold it with a plier on the bottom and then I use my tweezers to put it back in place. So this one goes over here somewhere. Now I’m going to heat it up. That’s in there. I’m going to melt a little bit of the plastic around it to flatten it out. That’s it.

Check it out, they’re back in there! Now if I use my little tweezers, I’m not able to pull it out. Obviously this might be short-lived—I don’t know how long, how strong the plastic is going to be, to be honest—but it’s better than what was there before. Let me try to see if this screws back on.

Check this out: I have screwed in those three screws, and now when I lift it up, they are secured. So the fix was a success! Obviously you have to be very careful when you bend this because you don’t want to put excess force there, but much better than being completely loose. All you had to do was get your soldering iron out and push those nuts back into the plastic. I was lucky enough to have enough material in the base so that it was able to hold in, but that’s a quick fix.

Now I’m going to work on putting it back together.

Alright, so here it is. You can see here it’s up and running. If I go to the drive here in My Computer and hit eject, the CD ROM drive ejects. So that’s working. The hinge is back to normal, so if I lift it up from there, I can open and close it perfectly fine. Yeah, now I have a working laptop for 35 bucks!

If you found this useful—this little hack with a soldering iron to melt in the standoffs back into the case—let me know in the comments and hit the like button so that other people can actually find this video and maybe go ahead and fix up a laptop that they want to get back in working order. Yeah, let me know what you think and subscribe. It really helps grow the channel, and hopefully I can put up more videos with some of my other machines. Thank you, bye-bye!