Welcome to The Grok Shop! today's video is going to be all about hacking SIM
cards down. now if you need to upgrade your mobile phone or cell phone you may
find that it uses a smaller size SIM card and there are several SIM card
sizes out there. in today's video I'll be reducing a micro sim to a nano SIM. now
of course the normal process will be to get a new SIM card from your carrier.
In some cases you might be able to get them for free but usually you have to pay and
sometimes you can get an aftermarket one for a little cheaper and then activate
it but this provides a shortcut from the headache and might save you a little
money. start off by removing your SIM card from your old phone. here I'm using
an old iPhone 4. Next, you want to take your new phone and remove the SIM card
holder. this phone is a Google pixel phone. so you want to try inserting the
SIM card into the new phone's SIM card tray verify that it doesn't fit before
you proceed with this. so now just to illustrate the size difference I have
one of these SIM cards where you can punch out the nano portion from the
micro portion and you can see the size difference here between the two.
so of course I could use the template from the punch-out to draw the nano-sim
boundary onto the micro-sim but since most of you won't have that I'm going to
use this printout template method so when you print it out make sure you're
printing on your size printers paper so the template should be matched. for
example if you got a letter printer you want to have a letter template and then
you need to print to actual size and then you can use some calipers if you
have them you need to measure the distances shown on the printout so that
they're exactly correct. you can also use a ruler to get pretty... pretty close, close
enough for the purposes of this anyway.
okay next you need to use some double-sided tape to attach the
micro-sim to the template. I use some 3m little wall-hanger tape thingies. it
really doesn't matter as long as it's stuck on there really good. again you want to
have the contact side facing up just as shown in the picture there. and make sure
that the sim is positioned exactly within the boundaries shown on the
template.
next you want to take a sharpie or some other form of permanent marker and a
ruler and mark along the boundaries on the outside of where the cuts are
indicated. so that basically you'll be cutting away
the areas that are marked with the sharpie.
so, it should look kind of like this when you're done. one thing to be aware of is that little dot in the top middle
there notice that the corner cut bevel key is
below and to the right of that. when you're done cutting you'll be left with
nothing but these contacts and the chip area and so it's possible to get
disoriented if you don't keep that straight. okay next we can pull the
SIM up off the template, remove the tape from the SIM and here I'm just
going to bring over that little template from the punch-out SIM I had just check
how well I drew these guides on here
alright so next is time to bust out the scissors. I recommend some good sharp
ones. it's really not that difficult to cut but when it's sharp you can get nice
clean clean edges. I recommend cutting it a little fat cut just to the outside of
the marker leave just a little bit of black behind or whatever color your
marker is and that way when you're done trimming with the scissors you can come
back with a file and file it down just so it fits nice and snug inside that SIM tray.
okay next is time to bust out the files. I tried quite a few different types of
files and had some varying degrees of success. main thing is you want something
kind of mild you don't want anything too brutish.
you could use sandpaper maybe a tube 220 grit or higher. the key of it all is
going to be just taking a little bit of material off each edge at a time and
then going back to your template or your tray and seeing if it fits in there okay
and looking at where you need to take more material off and just keep working
down each edge until it fits in there nice and snug.
once you get the SIM to where it fits nice and snug in the tray, be sure to clean it
off dust it off a little bit last thing you want is getting some sim dust in
your phone.
That's how it's done.
Thanks for watching.