Part 3: Replacing Front Glass

This is the last part of this blog. All my faithful readers must be wandering if I ever made it successful. Well let me explain my experience during the fixture process.

I was for weeks trying to find a better adhesive to fix the glass panel as firm as it was originally on the phone, but unfortunately there was a downside on every adhesive I found. I Google for the adhesive that was used on the original iphone and came to know it was VHB produced by 3M I am not going to guarantee that this was the adhesive but it was close to the adhesive used in iphones. The bad news is I was unable to find this adhesive anywhere in Sri Lanka or Singapore even from the 3M agents did not have this.

So I had to look for an alternative like clear double sided adhesive tapes or clear adhesive but none to my knowledge met my requirement or iphone standard adhesive requirement. After googling for 3 days I was left with my own conclusion – Apple used clear double sided tape to glue the digitizer and the FGP (Front Glass Panel). With utter disappointment I started to look for the near next best thing for the pasting of the FGP onto the digitizer. UHU!



I went to a local stationary store and bought my self an all purpose UHU which indicated that it is a clear adhesive which will stick on several surfaces including GLASS!

I did not go right away pasting the FGP to the digitizer – I wanted to see the results (clarity and strength of the adhesive). So I initially tried layering two glass pieces one on top of the other, I applied the adhesive generously on the middle layered the second piece on top and applied pressure on it, the excess glue oozed out when the pressure was applied, I placed a heavy object to sustain the pressure until it was dry enough to see the result.

After 2 hours, when I checked, the glasses were very transparent and pretty strong on to each other. With a big smile I followed the same procedure. While switched off, I applied a circular blob of adhesive to the digitizer (a little more than it needed to cover the area when I apply pressure) then I layered the FGP gently on top of the digitizer and applied some pressure, as planned the glue spread around covering the entire digitizer area (about 20 mins) then I placed a heavy object on top of the phone and went to bed with the satisfaction on using my phone again the next day.

THE NEXT DAY!
With enthusiasm and excitement I pop out of my bed to get my iphone, noticed the adhesive was dry and clear. With a big smile I switched it on. Surprisingly the screen started to glitch frantically. Whoops! I think I screwed it up. I immediately switched it off and removed the front glass carefully prying up from the edges of the front glass, for my luck the glass came off. I applied solvent and cleaned both the digitizer and the FGP. I noticed a burned area on my digitizer after cleaning, I was not too sure what it was but I had the impression the digitizer conked! I tried switching the phone on and it was working normally (God Bless) but the touch sensitivity for some reason did not function. With utter regret and disappointment I wrapped the phone back in the box giving up the idea of ever getting it to work. I screwed it big time…

Later that day I just took out of the box and tried switched it on for the last time, to my surprise the burnt area of the digitizer had slightly faded, out of curiosity I tried switching the phone and tried using the touch feature, apart from the affected (burnt area) the other places started to function.. YIPEE!!! I regained faith! Day after day I checked the screen the touch feature was same as before but the burnt area was rapidly fading off. Five days after the burnt area was completely gone and the entire screen was touch sensitive.. WOOHOO!

I did not want to risk my phone following the same procedure, so this time I applied UHU to all four corners of the phone (the black area of the phone). Placed a heavy book on top of the phone (faced up) to maintain the pressure till the adhesive is well fixed, hoping and praying the phone will start to work from tomorrow, I went to bed.


THE NEXT DAY
Switched the phone and guess what? It’s working like it should…


2 MONTHS LATER
I did not want to give an immediate feedback on this as a solution because I wanted to see how durable this approach was. The were some drawbacks in the approach but nothing major if you have the guts to simply ignore and get used to. They are in random order…

Touch sensitivity at times freezes, I am not too sure why this happens but I regain control as I toggle on/off screen switch.

The second problem is I applied the adhesive to all four corners and not to the edges of the glass panel, the price for overlooking this issue was tiny dust particles in the screen which is distracting (and gives you tiny heartaches when you look at them) initially - but I got used to it, but this also caused another annoying problem – if tiny drops of water enter between the tiny space of the digitizer and FGP it tends to disable the touch sensitivity, I had to use a hairdryer to evaporate the water out of the panel (when using the hairdryer the heat causes the UHU to loosen up slightly nothing to worry about - jfyi). So these are the two annoying facts on using this approache if you can live with it then I think you can bring your broken iphone back to life.


CONCLUSION
I had fun sharing my experience with all my faithful visitor, and I’m really happy my mission had a happy (but annoying at times in the long run) ending. I hope this blog sourced most of you as a benefit on what and what not to do when you are planning to DIY. But I think there must be people apart from me who would have found much cheaper / better solutions / approach on fixing their broken iphone glass (like the $5 approach). I would be happy to see some of their experiences posted here.


DISCLAIMER
At the same time please note that I am not posting a solution for anyone, this is just my experience shared to all viewing party, I will not claim responsibility for anyone experimenting at home and got themselves (and their iphone) into a mess.