Replacing LG VK810 Digitizer on a Tablet

I have been meaning to post more stuff. Things have gotten... well I don't want to say busy, but I have certainly found myself doing less student/project related things now that it's summer time and all the students are gone. I am looking forward to the fall semester.

Anyways, recently my granddad's tablet's screen broke. I would have liked to just replace the glass because I have seen the method that's commonly used to replace glass on phones and would have liked to give that a go, but instead my granddad purchased the whole digitizer and glass assembly. I did try to find the glass alone, but I wasn't able to find anything. So I offered to take it apart and see if I could figure out how to get the thing replaced and back together.

I should have taken a picture of the tablet broken, but I assure this was sufficiently broken. I tried to stay fairly thorough. I was kind of a little frustrated with how much glass there was and how days after I still found glass splinters in my hands. If you're reading this and you have anything that is glass that doesn't have some kind of screen protector on it order one for it now. Glass plates, glass mugs, glass armor. Doesn't matter what it is, having that adhesive clear protector on it would have limited my glass splinter levels down. Anyways, to the breakdown.

The hardest part was getting the back plastic case off the electronics portion of the tablet. The entire plastic bottom case is a solid piece and you can't slide or unlock something to get it apart. Which you just pretty much try to apply a wide surface area of pressure and pry it out. (I used a screw driver and some cursing to do the trick.)

Once it's apart, things at least made sense looking at how to. We have a ribbon thing, a battery thing, a printed circuit board thing, and an aluminum tape thing. It was kind of frustrating that I couldn't find any advice on how to take apart this specific model of the LG tablet. I did find other models and other tablets so from a combining what people on the internet said and what I could see I managed to start taking things by pieces.

Keep in mind, I deconstructed the entire tablet. I needed to remove the old digitizer and clean the old broken glass from the plastic chassis. I started with the removed the pcb so I could remove the ribbon cable so I could get the battery out. So after unscrewing everything and then double checking to make sure I didn't miss screws I did find that the manufacturers were not shy about using adhesive to keep everything together. If you're removing things and feel it's stuck then it probably is and you just need to lightly apply pressure and wait for it to come unstuck.

Because I'm replacing the digitizer assembly, everything needs to come out. Camera, speaker, plastic housing bits, secret connector bits, and even some of the tape that was used as, what I'm guessing to be, insulation.

Once I got one side of the ribbon cable free, I needed to work on the other side of the ribbon cable would goes to the USB connector and what looked to be sound/microphone pcb. Again this was moving things out of the way once they were unscrewed and keeping special looking tape and just overall being gentle with the connectors.

Once the ribbon cable was free so I could remove the battery, getting the rest of the bits out of their holes and crevices was a lot more simple and I was able to see the back of the old digitizer.

Removing the old digitizer from the plastic chassis, which you can see underneath with all the broken glass, required a heat gun, patience, and time. It wasn't necessarily important to be slow to preserve the old digitizer so much as I needed to keep the plastic chassis in tact without melting it with the heat gun. Similarly, I used the heat gun and a flat head screwdriver to remove the old adhesive and broken glass from the chassis as well.

 This is the cleaned chassis next to the new digitizer assembly. Now that's left is to reverse the process and put it all together. I only encountered two different types of screws that were distinctly different so I didn't have an issue as long as I used the right screw, but I also tried to keep the correct screw with it's corresponding hole on a piece of paper so I didn't muck everything up. Attaching the new digitizer to the plastic chassis, I used UV curing tape that for some reason we had on hand in the instrument shop. Allegedly it's pretty cheap, but it was convenient because we also had a UV bath (it looks like a cheap nail salon UV bath) to help the curing process.

Once everything was back together, it turned on and nothing smoked out of the headphone jack. It was interesting, but really I don't think I want to do that again. I do not particularly like working with broken glass.