When you’re trying to convince an Apple Store Genius that your nine-month-old MacBook Air inexplicably stopped working and you most certainly did not pour a steaming cup of coffee all over it, there’s one question you definitely don’t want to hear: How come it smells like hazelnut?

So as I walked away with a $750 repair estimate and the world’s thinnest $1799 paperweight, I pondered my options: 1) toss it in the river and wait for all those tablet rumors to come true; 2) stab it repeatedly and buy a ThinkPad; or 3) try my hand at fixing it.

After some lengthy looks at my carving knife, the latter option won out.

It’s not as if I’m a complete stranger to do-it-yourself Mac repairs. Back when I owned a Power Mac G4, I upgraded the processor and hard drive, swapped out the graphics card for an NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti, modded the case with a blue led, and fixed a pesky buzzing speaker. And before I sold it to raise funds for my MBA purchase, I fitted my 17-inch PowerBook G4 with a speedier, larger hard drive.

But that’s bush league compared to a complete disassembly of one of the most expensive Macs I’ve ever owned. (Of course, the stress level is significantly lessened when the computer does little more than emit the not-so-faint aroma of flavored coffee, but it’s still pretty low on my list of would-be guinea pigs.) So I took a deep breath, armed myself with a Phillips #00 screwdriver, tiny flathead and T6 Torx, and went to work.

Really screwed

A few notes before we begin. As far as spills go, this one seemed particularly nasty. A near-full 12-ounce mug of very hot coffee (no milk or sugar) landed almost in its entirety on my laptop, and I did very little to stop its path of destruction. Not only did I not shut it down, my immediate reaction (after grabbing a boatload of paper towels and placing them unmethodically on the keyboard) was to to pull a bunch of important files over my network. When I finally shut it down a few minutes later, it performed the cycle as it should; but I didn’t turn it over or try to dry it any way until several hours later, when it was clearly too late.

The first thing I gathered (besides my trio of mini magnetic tools and a healthy disdain for Apple’s team of Geniuses) was a series of labeled cups, which I crudely fashioned from small bits of paper. Apple may have trimmed the girth from the newest member of its MacBook family, but there’s certainly no shortage of screws in the thing. Once the bottom case was unfastened (10 screws) and the powerful aroma of week-old coffee dissipated, I went to work at removing the giant battery.

Nine more screws later, I gave the cable a slight tug to disconnect it from the logic board and the battery easily pulled out. A few Handi Wipes took care of the streaks of coffee that peppered the underside, and I set it aside.

With the battery gone, the neat internal design became abundantly clear, with the logic board, hard drive, and a host of cables and ribbons all ripe for the picking. While there didn’t seem to be any definitive place to begin (though some pieces are obviously dependent on another’s removal), the hard drive (and, by extension, USB port and speaker) was the most logical.

I opted to tackle the most delicate pieces first and began to loosen the amber data ribbons--1) pulling up the largest’s black tab unsnapped it from the logic board; 2) GENTLY unsticking the smaller audio cable offshoot separated it from the case and allowed me to easily shimmy it out of its port; and 3) utilizing my flathead as a spudger popped up the hard drive ribbon (just below the fan).

Four screws held the drive in place (two in back, one in front, and one by the fan) and another four secured the USB hatch in place. Finally, one little guy next to the left hinge helped the mic cable stay clamped down.

Break it down

By now, the whole complicated arrangement should have pulled cleanly away from the case -- that is, if I had known there was a tiny screw hidden below a cover near the right rear corner of the drive. Presumably, it’s supposed to be delicately pried off its adhesive perch, giving way to the final peg. (But if that doesn’t work, you can always do what I did: Yank and twist the hard drive until the cover, screw and housing all snap off in one fell swoop.)

After logging my first broken piece, I removed the speaker (2 screws), gingerly unstuck the audio cable from the case and lifted out the whole contraption, including the attached ribbon and cable.

At this point of the disassembly--with the bottom case, battery, hard drive, port hatch, speaker, 31 screws and one useless broken tab all labeled and separated--I’d pretty much reached the point of no return. Save for the stains on the battery case, I hadn’t found anything to indicate my liquid enemy had inflicted damage of any kind, and my plight was quickly becoming personal. I wanted to prove the Genius wrong. (Or at least knock him down a peg.)

With nary a notion of how to actually go about fixing the thing, however, my teardown strategy consisted of little more than a reckless and gleeful disregard for Apple’s warranty. But I wasn’t about to let something as insignificant as a Core 2 Duo processor stand in my way.