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ok some people asked for a tutorial for this so here it is. This tutorial is done on a 1.33ghz ibook g4. I cannot garuntee the advice will be suitable for other ibooks or apple powerbooks

Having a new ibook i naturally wanted to change some aspect of it, I looked at painting it, but soon found out that people who changed this regretted it eventually, and that my ibooks case isn't transparent painted white so it wouldn't work....you get the idea. I opened the top oas it required the least amount of work, though to hex screws holding it on sucked to take off.

I used the wrong tools and almost ended up stripping a screw, be smart and buy a small alan key, me no smrt! Here a pic of my tools..



yea theres a scalpel (sp?), two screw drivers, some broken scissors and a make shift spanner.

the 2 most important tools are by far the screwdriver (duh) and the spanner. The spanner is used to seperate the case from the screen and surrounding plastic, make sure it sturdy but has alot of flexibility because theres some stuff you might not want to break (namely the display and mic).

heres how felexible my spanner was



ok so take of the four kex screws holding on the case. the hardest screw to remove (on mine at least) is the left hand side screw at the back end on the sidew of the computer, this is the one that i almost stripped and had to really take my time, regardless this is a very simple task and shouldn't take more that 5 minutes.

Now gently pull the bottom right hand side of the case away from the screen, I found this area the easiest to come off, now slide the spanner between the screen and the case (between the grey and the white areas) and begin to slide and pry up but BE CAREFUL not to damage the internal mic, once you get in the vicinity of the mic either use your fingers of pull the spanner out slightly so as not to clip any wires. Eventually as you move up the screen the case should begin to come loose. Now reapeat this process on the left hand side. as well as the top.

At this point you case should be loose and all it requires is a good hard pry, do this on the top of the screen near the center, it should come off,  if not try re spanning the sides.

ok once the case pops of it should look like this.




notice how there is simply paper over the light, this is your key to aneasy mod, simply exacto the paper out, i was carefull not to cut the styrofoam as it is there to protect your screen, but to each his own i suppose.

Here is the inside with the cut away paper, you can see scratches in the metal, those are from the scalpel and don't really harm the computer.



ok now its up to you, chose a colour, find the appropriate paper, make sure its not very thick, the original white piece is acctually plastic thats semi opaque, so finding a similar piece in a different colour would be ideal but not nessicary, be sure to test how the paper looks with the light shinning through it and think hard because its no fun to take apart again.

so you have your paper, cut it in the general shape of the apple light, make sure there is over coverage on all sides so no white light gets through as this will ruin the effect.

heres what i made my filter out of and there it is after its cut.



ok so now you have to attach it to the metal surrounding the light. Luckily for me the material i used was a sticker and i just slapped it on, but if you used paper or plastic i would reccomend using clear scotch tape as its easy to remove should you decide to change your colour, and it wont interfer with any of the light going through the material.

heres the filter attached on the light



the rest is very simple, just follow your steps backward, place the screen on again (make sure you do it the right way!) and pop in the screws. boot up your machine and make sure the screen works, also test to see if you internal mic works. Other than that its a pretty low risk mod.

Heres the end result





this is my first mod, so if its noobish i have a excuse..

pelle

Last edited by pelle (2005-09-09 6:43 pm)