How to peel off the stylus holder?

Hi,

I am having my new T5 for some time already and want to get rid of this thing (see photo). I do use my finger for touchscreening and never need that, so its only causing inconveniences.

The question is, how to do it and not cause a cosmetic damage - I wouldn't like to have any scratches so seek for some smarter way then just by putting a knife in between.

Any advice appreciated.

 

The stylus holder is held together with a double-sided tape, and can be removed with a non-alcoholic substance; I would not recommend this as it's possible to damage the LCD, and if the unit is under warranty Panasonic will not cover it.

 

I've never had a T5 in my hands as I only deal with the fully rugged models... But from the picture it looks like it can come off. You may try to use fishing line to do this. Either that or a very thin guitar string. For fishing line you'll probably need like a 40# test or so. Just coil a length in each hand and work it in between the two pieces that you want to separate. Then work in a see-saw type of sawing motion until you work it all the way through. I'd try fishing line first as it wouldn't leave any type of mark on the plastic. The guitar string probably wouldn't either... But it would depend on how vigorous you worked the string.

 

If the top cover is die-molded aluminum sheet (I think it is), your safest route would be to remove the top cover, heat the area with a heat gun, and peel the offending widget off.

Or you could try a plastic picnic knife... if it's held on with foam tape, it will cut the tape in half and you should be able to roll the residue off with your thumb.

After that, you may need to use denatured alcohol to clean off any ookum left behind; try on an inconspicuous area FIRST, just in case ToughBook Exchange's warnings about alcohol ARE sanguine. I've cleaned about a BAZILLION laptops with denatured alcohol and only injured a few, all of which had funky "matte" finishes on them, so I simply make sure NEVER to use denatured alcohol on anything with a matte finish.

If you are REALLY PARANOID about it you can use GooGone instead; I just can't stand the oily residue it leaves behind.

Good luck,

mnem
Or you could try gasoline...

 

The top cover is magnesium, like the other toughbooks.

The fishing line trick is used by car enthusiasts to "debadge" automobiles, so it should work.

Heat guns...too hot for computer parts!! :O

 

Well, actually, NONE of the Toughbooks are PURE magnesium; they are an aluminum-magnesium alloy. We like to JOKE about them catching on fire; but it isn't serious - there's simply too much aluminum in the alloy for that to happen.

They Do this ON PURPOSE to make it safe to release to the public; do you REALLY think they would hand a soldier a piece of equipment that would catch on fire and burn a hole through the floor of his transport if inadvertently struck by a tracer round or shrapnel from a potassium grenade?

No, in fact most of the popular aluminum alloys out there contain a fair amount of magnesium, particularly those used in aviation & automotive "blingwares". It's FUN to CALL it magnesium because of the aerospace connotation that term has had since the 50s; but even Lockheed got rid of magnesium wheels on the Blackbird in the '60s when they got sick of them causing catastrophic fires on multi-million-dollar aircraft.


As for the fishing line trick, it DOES work... but it's also a good way to get some REALLY nasty friction burns/cuts/blisters when the line slips in your fingers. Been dere, dunnat. Much rather do the heat gun thing myself; I have a heat gun, and they're not that hard to take apart.

mnem
Make mine with cheese and grilled onions, please...

 

As an admitted pyromaniac I disagree a little. This stuff DOES burn... It burns hot... It burns fast and it burns easily.... BUT... It must be in flaked or finely ground form for it to do so.

I have modified so many of these and have, at times, needed to grind away some of the magnesium to install something. (Usually a GPS antenna on the CF-28) I started saving the grindings in a little dish and then, when I had enough, I would dump it all into this big, sealed test tube that I have in the shop. Long story short... I needed to resharpen my lawn mower blades on my bench grinder. A spark from that launched about 6-7 feet away and landed in the little plastic dish that held the dime sized amount of magnesium powder from a recent CF-28 build. I saw the flash out of the corner of my eye and the white burning mass consumed the plastic dish in about 5 seconds. This prompted a slight change in my shop policy.... No open magnesium dust!

No.... Could you hold a Bic lighter under the Toughbook and have it burn... Absolutely not. We've even seen the photos of these being burned in the police cars and military Hummers and still come out working. I think you'd have to have a steady heat of a few thousand degrees for this stuff to burn up the way it left Panasonic's factory.

 

Warning....crumb-crushing occurs below!!

Are you implying that that aluminum used in the magnesium toughbooks makes them flame-resistant? That's not true.

Toughbooks are cast from AZ91. 89.8% Magnesium. 9% Aluminum, 1% Zinc, and 0.2% Manganese.

No-one said that a toughbook was pure magnesium. They are not an aluminum-magnesium alloy, but a magnesium alloy with small amounts of aluminum and zinc.

No. Magnesium does not have to be "made safe". My car has AZ91 magnesium alloy valve covers. Plenty of Corvettes have Magnesium alloy wheels.

I don't believe this is true, and I work in the defense industry...

 

Uh-Oh.....

 

ALLOY.

Notice the term ALLOY. It means a mixture of metals; if it has Aluminum in it, is is an Aluminum ALLOY. If it has Magnesium in it, it is ALSO a Magnesium ALLOY. You want to quibble over proportions, go for it. Yes, alloys are usually referred to in terms of the predominant metal; but nonetheless, if an alloy has a significant amount of any metal in it, it is an alloy of that metal.

As for the lid to the T5 - I believe it IS made of die-molded sheet; if so, it is probably an aircraft aluminum alloy with a high extrusion coefficient; predominantly magnesium alloys are too brittle to stand up to the die-forming process.

It doesn't require a LOT of aluminum to make magnesium MUCH more stable; I'm talking about the difference between having a fire with powdered metal ignited by molten steel versus material which will burn, in block form, from the heat of a match. Remember, even FLOUR can be an explosive if mixed with enough air. (Go ahead - Google it)

As for your statements regarding AZ-91 composition, you need to do a little more research. There are several different subspecifications of AZ-91; SOME OF WHICH are stable enough to weld, both by Shielded Arc process and friction-stir process.

Oh... and as for the wheels on the Blackbird - get the story from the people who built and flew them:

http://www.wvi.com/~sr71webmaster/srloss~1.htm

http://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/

http://habu.org

http://habu.org/books-videos.html#newdash1

mnem
Bigger, faster, louder. All the good things in life...

 

Magnesium alloys are not too brittle to die form. Dymag does it with their magnesium alloy motorcycle. Other companies continue to improve the process. It is very easy to do with grain refined magnesium alloys at higher temperatures. It's challenging to do in a cold-forming operation (not because of brittleness, but because of springback.) Either way, it's not beyond a company like Panasonic or its part suppliers to achieve this.

Regardless of the quantity of my research, I don't understand what weldability of magnesium has anything to do with toughbooks??!! Are you testing some super secret next-gen toughbook?

I just read through the page, that is interesting. It seems like the first wheel fire was combustion by heat from the brakes burning, the second by friction.

You are a wealth of knowledge dwagon sir, but also sometimes hard to understand!!

 

What you're talking about is NOT die-molding, it's injection die-casting, done with molten metal. Different animal all together. And while I imagine it would be POSSIBLE for a company like Panny to develop a formulation of magnesium alloy that IS die-moldable, why would they go to the expense and trouble, only to yield an inferior product? Any of the much more common aircraft aluminum alloys they could choose from would perform much better.

As I suggested earlier - IF - and I say IF - the top cover is die-molded from sheet, it is PROBABLY some aircraft grade predominantly Aluminum alloy (which will also be a MAGNESIUM ALLOY because it does contain Magnesium).

I'm not trying to yank your chain here - my point is this - the people who write the technical specifications think in these terms, so when you're trying to understand what is really meant by "f ull Magnesium alloy case" that does NOT necessarily mean that the ENTIRE case is made of predominantly Magnesium alloy; in order to fulfill that description, all that has to be is that MOST of EACH PORTION of the case is made of SOME Magnesium alloy, and in the manufacturing world, aircraft Aluminum is close enough.

Even our beloved Full-rugged CF-28,29 & 30s, while indeed entirely cast from a predominantly Magnesium alloy, all have OUTSIDE PARTS which are NOT Magnesium alloy, because those PARTS would not perform as well if made of Magnesium alloy.

As far as weldability goes - my point there is that if you can arc weld these newer alloys, it is quite obvious they are more stable than the older formulas which most manufacturers have abandoned for safety's sake.

On to the wheels of the Blackbird -

The SOURCE of the fire is not in contention - one time, the brakes caused the tire to catch on fire, another time a tire blowout caused the Magnesium alloy rim to contact the tarmac at high speed (which also happened when the tire caught on fire in the earlier accident); but once the wheel ignited due to it's flammable composition, that fire was intense enough to destroy a mostly Titanium aircraft capable of sustained flight with skin temperatures around 300 degrees C or MORE. THAT is why Lockheed abandoned them in favor of a predominantly Aluminum alloy wheel.

Now of course the ultimate answer here would be for one of our members who OWNS a T5 to take the lid apart and tell us; I could be COMPLETELY WRONG about it being die-formed, it COULD BE a casting, in which case it is PROBABLY similar Magnesium alloy to the base, and to our beloved full-rugged ToughBooks, and your beloved DyMag rims...

mnem
Of course we could just poke the dwagon with a cattle prod and watch him jump...

 

My Uncle was a flight safety officer for Boeing... He's told me some wild stories about burning magnesium parts on aircraft... I think he even sent me a few pics once...

Do not EVER poke the dwagon!

 

No, you are talking about injection die-casting, I'm talking about hot-forming. This is taking metal to just over its crystallization temperature so that the deformation occurs plastically. This is a common process.

HUh?? You say although it is entirely cast from magnesium alloy, all have outside parts that are not magnesium? What parts are those? Are you talking about the black plastic that isn't metal?

Confused again *head hurts from reading dwagon posts*

 

Well I thought that for the price we pay for a new toughbook, that they were made of titanium,or platinum lol


Alex

 

Okay.... Let's just agree to disagree... Or not understand... Or whatever.... Let's get back to Kul Cat's isue about removing the stylus holder.

Have you worked on that yet Kul Cat?

 

Mnem..Man! the guy only need to take out the piece of plastic on the lid not to start an engine or to lit a fire. Lol...



ohlip

 

Well, no... the gasoline was to pour on the dwagon, before poking him with the cattle prod... I do believe it would have been less painful...

HAS ANYBODY HERE ACTUALLY TAKEN A T5 LCD APART? Do we KNOW FOR CERTAIN if the lid is CAST or STAMPED SHEET METAL?

YES, I meant the plastic bits, and the chrome bits, and the steel bits, etc.

Who cares if you COULD develop the process do that with Magnesium, or if it's even already been done? A manufacturer WOULDN'T BOTHER to tool up that way for ONE PART, when cold-stamping out of aircraft Aluminum is proven, cheap, will yield a better product, and they're already tooled up for it.

Geez... I feel like I'm being pecked to death by a duck...

Kul Kat, I wish you the best of luck.

mnem
I've expended entirely too much mental energy on this argument; I will not respond any further. Namaste.

 

The T2 and T4 have lids stamped from aluminum (AL+PUR) so i think the T5 would be the same. It.s the same material that is on the battery cover of a MK1 CF-28.

 

You guys are great, I haven't seen anyone really hang in there with the dwagon that long since I've been posting here. I think son pretty much gave up when he said he couldn't understand the dwagon though.

Even if mnem was wrong about something (not saying he is) I would still have to believe him because he uses big words and is very convincing

Dan

 

Mnem...continue your word of wisdom. I mean no harm here just making some fun.



olhip

 

What a nice thread! Thank you for all the tips, and so much interesting information

Hmm...what was I asking about to start with? How to burn an aircraft? Or how to poke the dwagon?

I didn't have time yet, will try something this weekend and then get it posted here.

 

Hopefully, there will be some room left here to post your results



Alex

 

Well, i've tried both with a fishing line and with a knife and it was going so hard looked like i can really damage it. So I decided to leave it as it is though I dont like this thing. Thanks everyone for responses anyway!