My name's Abdullah Kabani.
I own a phone-repair company.
I'm going to walk you through
how to restore a cracked iPad.
This is a fifth-generation Apple iPad.
The person that brought this in, if I remember correctly,
one day he just looked at it and he was really angry
and he just threw it against the garage wall,
and that's how this happened.
Since this frame is bent like a banana,
it crushed just about everything in its way,
including the screen, the battery, and the LCD.
To replace the frame,
we practically have to rebuild the entire iPad,
reusing all the parts that we can
and replacing the ones that we need to.
This screen is destroyed,
so we're just going to yank it out.
To get started, we have to loosen up the adhesive
that's holding the screen down into the frame.
Normally we use some heat with a heat pad,
but this frame was so bent
that it wouldn't sit down flat,
so we have to use a heat gun.
As I heat up and loosen up the adhesive,
I'll use my blade to pry the glass up from the frame.
I'll carefully scrape out
the remaining glass in the frame,
because that'll get in the way
when I try to remove this LCD.
I'll remove the remaining glass with a scalpel.
As soon as I lift up the LCD
and expose the battery connection,
I'll use this little battery separator
to remove any power supply
and the risk of shorting something out.
Frame replacements require a whole lot of work,
because I have to remove
every single component in this iPad
and put it into the new frame.
Every component is important and serves a purpose,
so I have to be really careful not to damage anything,
'cause we're going to reuse it.
The most important part is the motherboard.
My customer got really lucky that the motherboard
didn't get damaged with the bend in the frame.
In my experience, all lithium batteries
have about a two-and-a-half- to three-year life span
before they start acting up,
and this iPad's been sitting in a really cold garage
for a long time, so since we're doing all this work,
we figured we might as well replace the battery
so that it'll last a lot longer.
I don't like using too much heat on the battery,
so I'll use a little bit of acetone
to loosen up the adhesive,
then jump straight to my spudger and pry that thing out.
I don't actually have to remove the battery for this repair,
but it'll make getting everything else out a lot easier.
In order to safely do this repair,
I have to be meticulous with my hand movements,
because any slip can damage a cable or a battery,
start a fire.
To get started with the reassembly,
we'll install the power and volume buttons
just before installing the motherboard.
I'm using my screwdriver and some screws
to hold it in place.
Some components require screws,
and others just adhesive.
We use a higher-than-original-quality aftermarket battery
that uses Texas Instruments capacitors
that regulate the power voltage.
I use my tweezers, my screwdriver,
and my battery-separating tool,
because even though I'm putting the battery back in,
I still don't want it to give any power to the motherboard
until I have everything else plugged in.
I'll use some heat to loosen up the adhesive
underneath the home button.
We'll have to transfer that one over to the new screen,
otherwise the fingerprint functionality won't work anymore.
Broken glass shards often get stuck
to the adhesive underneath the home button,
so I have to be really careful,
because those can damage the new screen.
To readhere the home button,
we'll use a mixture of
slow- and fast-setting industrial glue.
I use four different types of glue
to seal the screen down onto the frame.
I'll start by prepping the frame
with some adhesion promoter.
I'll also use some industrial-strength glue.
And a few drops of superglue so that it sets fast
just before we clamp it.
When I'm reassembling an iPad,
even the tiniest speck of dust can ruin the entire repair.
A fingerprint could get in between the layers of the screen
and drive someone insane,
and if it's already sealed up,
then we'd have to open it up
and do about an hour of cleaning,
so we have to be very careful.
I use the clamps to secure everything together
so I can restore the original airtight seal.
Normally I would have to leave them on for days,
but thankfully, since I used a few drops of superglue,
I only have to leave it in for 20 minutes.
This specific repair took a lot more work
than your average iPad repair,
and I'm just grateful
that we were able to bring it back to life.