CF-18 touchpanel and LCD replacement

I saw in the BST section a forum member who was on the fence on whether to change out his touch panel or not. So I'm posting some pictures for the benefit of ewomack.

First off, you can figure out how to do (mostly) everything by watching the 5 part series from bobjohnson.

Panasonic Toughbook CF-18 Wireless Antenna removal - YouTube

I don't endorse this person, i just happened upon their videos when i searched. Truth be told I only watch the first one for removing the lid panel. After that it wasn't complicated (not that taking the lid off was either)...

In total this took about 1.5 hours and 2 beers

So first take of the lid panel by removing the screws circled in red. On the opposite side you need to remove all the screws for the antenna covers.



Once you pop that off you're presented with this:


Pretty much everything you need to do is labelled in that picture except you'll want to remove all the antennae from the front bezel. That way you can take it somewhere else to work on it.

Now because my kids were running around the house while i was doing this, I didn't take all the pictures i would have liked to... But once everything that needs to be is disconnected the LCD will just come out.

You're then left with the touch panel stuck to the front bezel with double sided tape.

Take an exacto blade and run it between the touch panel and the bezel to get it to come off. Once you remove it you'll have to go around with the blade to remove all remnants of double sided tape. You need a clean surface for the new stuff to stick to.

In the touch panel kit you get a piece of foam that has white paper on one side, and clear film on the other. This is the double sided tape, there's a rectangle cutout in the sheet and it's just the border that goes into the bezel.

I opted to leave the foam sheet in tact and remove the rectangle after it was adhered to the bezel:



As it says on the picture there, i had to run the exacto along the cut lines to get the rectangle out nicely.

After you get that removed, take the touch panel and just sit it in the bezel to get an idea of the alignment. The instructions in the kit said to align it with a rib in the bezel, but there were no marks on the touch panel to align it with...

Remove the other side of the tape and set in the touch panel. Apply even and light pressure along the double sided tape.

In the touch panel kit you are provided with foam spacers to put along the back border of the touch panel, these separate the panel from the lcd. Peel off the backing and install them.

At this point i set it my replacement LCD, and installation was the opposite of removal.

I went from this:


To This:


Never mind the coors... It was on sale

I have to give a shoutout to RuggedSolutions for providing me with the parts i needed at a fair price. Stand-up guy!

Cheers

 

Nice job kevin glad it worked out for you. Great post to show others how
its done. Thanks for the purchase.

 

As Jeff would say
Good show mate!