tools are always a part of any repair experience when you have a repair you always have your part
that you need to install or fix or change out but whether or not that repair goes well or
goes poorly really comes down to the tools and equipment that you have on hand ifixit's
been making our own tools for more than 10 years and we started making tools when we saw that the
tools you could buy at the hardware store weren't adequate for fixing cell phones laptops and other
electronics the tool development process often starts with the teardown having an in-house tear
down team is really convenient because we can go and have that research done the moment the device
is released when they're doing a product tear down they're taking something apart for the first time
no one else in the world other than the product Engineers who built it have seen inside this
thing and actually back when I was doing that job back when I was on the teardown team I identified
quite a few repair problems that we didn't have tools to to solve that no one did really
was on a teardown for the Apple watch the first Apple watch and we found the smallest tri-point
screws that I had ever seen and none of the bits in my Protec would fit it and so at the teardown
in Australia I luckily had some Jewelers files and was able to sharpen one of our our TriPoint bits
down small enough to get it out and keep going in fact I remember that year there was a competing
team also live posting their teardown and they got stuck at the screws and couldn't get past them
uh and so after we completed the teardown I talked to Brett who was then running the the product
engineering team and I told him hey we're going to need some smaller tri-point screws and I think
within a matter of weeks we had those for sale long before anyone had actually broken and needed
to fix their apple watches when we first took apart the 2012 IMAX with the super thin bezels
we found the official foam tape inside had a special kind of pizza wheel used for cutting it
open and this product was only available through apple and was very expensive and so we immediately
realized we can reverse engineer this product within a week of the teardown we were producing
our own version of the tool in-house that way people could start fixing their devices right
away so in deciding what tools to make we look at again always back to our our mission of helping
the most people fix the most things and so we try to focus our efforts on the most impactful tools
that we can starting around eight to ten years ago electronic devices kind of transitioned from
being held together with screws and clips to being held together with lots of layers of adhesive and
the the way to get through adhesive is usually heat and slow gentle prying we saw a really big
problem that our old solution of supplying customers with a single suction cup to stick
on their phone and pull it open that just wasn't sufficient for the more modern smartphones that
are just layers of glue and big huge thin panels of glass that really need a very slow gentle
a prying action a single suction cup by itself can only pry on one side of advice whereas the
anti-clamp holds the bottom in place and lifts the top at the same time without you having to apply
constant force to it and so one of the coolest features that I call the the slide nut is this
little locking nut right here has two positions right now it's the unlocked open position this
makes it really easy to put the tool on your device on the phone and squeeze it down with a a
known pressure you know how hard you're squeezing and then you can slide it Forward into this sort
of locked position and start cranking and as you turn the crank the arms separate and it holds the
suction cups in position right there so now what I can do is let go of this set it on the table and
it will continue slowly prying on my iPhone or S 31 whatever we're at now and then I can come in on
the sides with a thin prying tool and work at that adhesive while the anti-clamp does the work for me
we're always trying to make the repair experience better and often that means totally new tools or
finding Solutions in places we didn't expect for example the eye opener actually started out as
a sack of rice before the eye opener even existed the only way to get inside an iPad 2 was to use a
heat gun but there are a lot of consequences with melting plastic and damaging displays so one of
our Tech writers suggested using a therapeutic rice pack to help heat the glue on the side of
the iPad with some help she actually went home and she showed us a prototype of the eye opener
that very night out of muslin and rice in a little bag for many months we actually sold rice filled
bags as eye-openers however if you overheat a bag of rice your whole house smells like burnt rice
we went through several iterations of grain-based eye openers before we landed on our current eye
opener which is a polymer bag filled with glycerin that heats up better retains heat
better and transfers heat onto the iPad better as well and it doesn't smell like burnt rice tools
are always evolving here at iFixit we're always looking for ways to improve our existing products
back when I started as a tech writer our go-to bit set was the 54-bit Kit which was pretty much
a white label product in a clear plastic clamshell case all of the bits were held in little rubber
bit rows that were laid down in like a little stack inside this case and one of our biggest
improvements was replacing that with the Mako kit it's got a magnetic case you can actually
take the top off and there's a little sorting tray built into the into the top and there are
laser cut foam holes for everything everything is held in place really tightly and so if you
throw this case in your bag you're not gonna end up playing 64-bit pickup at the end of the
day and that's I think one of our most improved and awesome products that I'm really proud of we
redesigned the repair business toolkit to make sure that all the tools inside were appropriate
for all the modern repairs that people need to undertake so the RBT the repair business tool kit
is like our our apex predator product it is the the top level tool offering that includes all of
our other best tools and so we recently updated it by adding the fixed mat and the anti-clamp which
are our two newest awesome tools that definitely deserve to be in there the RBT is meant to be both
a repair station and a diagnostic station which is why we include a whole series of measurement
and instrumentation tools as well as the standard disassembly and fixing tools that you might find
in the protect toolkit I definitely feel like designing tools that address repair problems is
a really impactful way to help people fix the world around them every day I get excited to
help people make the world a better place with better tools and better repairs
I think that everybody has something broken in their life and it's really cool when
you find the right tool to fix it and so for all of the immeasurable repair problems out there we
are working on as many solutions as we can to help people fix things around them and it's the world