Reverse Engineering Gruppe 5 IBM Monitor

In the following Instructables, you'll see the disassembly of a IBM Thinkvision L171 17 inch monitor.

Followed by an exploded view composition, mountable on a wall.

we will take you through the steps of disassembly and mounting on a board with layman's terms and explanations.

the goal is that upon completion of this Intructables you'll know what parts this monitor consist of, how to take it apart without damaging the individual parts and have seen how we chose to mount the parts on a board.

you should as a minimum be able to replicate our process upon completion.

The monitor has a base plate as part of this stand.

Remove the rectangular plastic cover on the back of the stand and slide the base plate of. the base plate is now ready for disassembly. simply remove the pieces of black rubber, they are glued on, and unscrew the five screws.

this will separate the steel plate from the plastic cover, as shown in the image.

This is the view that meets you once you have removed the base plate and the plastic cover.

The circular plastic cover snaps of, it is kept on with four plastic barbs

The pivot arm and the last plastic cover is removed by unscrewing the two sets of four philips head screws. The one set mounts the pivot arm on the screen itself and the other set is holding the cover and the large metal arm together.

The small metal cover is simply taken off by removing the four screws on the sides.

The next step is a little tricky as there are a lot of washers, bolts and nuts keeping the large metal arm and the metal bracket together. the disassembly in itself is pretty simple but concentrations is necessary so the order of parts doesn't get mixed up. if it does use the image in this step of the intructables.

Two adjustable wrenches are necessary to take apart the small side with the brass nut, be aware that the bolt has been squashed, so disassembly can be difficult. the other (large) side is more easily taken apart with just one wrench. Be aware of the 2 large washers with indentations, that create the smooth levels when angling the screen, and how the are positioned.

the first step of taking apart the screen itself is removing the three screws underneath the front of the screen (the bezel), each of them has a small rubber part that prevents the screw from digging into other crucial parts.

when the bezel comes off, gently pull the plug out of the circuit board for the buttons. now just one screw holds the buttons and circuit board in place.

be mindful of the little plastic lense for the red searchlight, as it is small and see-through.

three screw on the back of the monitors plastic cover lets you remove the cover completely.

you should now have the stand and pivot arm in pieces, and have the plastic covers off as shown in the picture

remove the small piece of sheet metal and unplug the wires, these are the wires for the 2 fluorescent lights. unscrew the screws on the side of the metal case, you will see what you see in the picture above.

on the backside of the screen, the metal casing, you will see two circuit boards the large one is the power supply and the smaller is the graphics card.

be aware that the graphics card is connected to the lsd panel circuit board and will need to be unplugged before the two parts of the metal casing can be separated.

the two circuit boards inside the metal shield are easily removed by unscrewing their mounting screws in each of their corners. there are a couple of cable clamps, make sure that you have released the cables from these to avoid damaging them.

This is simply a view of the metal shield form behind and the screws removed.

the front part of the inner metal frame and the LCD panel, we dont suggest you remove the circuit board from the rest of the panel as we have done in this picture as reassembly is nearly impossible.

two screws holds the circuit board in place, these are easily removed.

these are the remaining parts, be aware that these are only kept in place by the metal frames. take special note of the order of the filters.

you have now successfully disassembled an IBM thinkvision monitor.

Upon completion of disassembly, make sure that all the parts are accounted for.

feel free to use the enclosed parts list, parts within are described layman's terms, they are numbered and the majority of the parts are weighted and measured.

This is our finished product, the following steps will review the steps taken, the methods and materials we used to make this.

These grooves were cut into the board where the parts of the screen could not be mounted themselves.

A piece of perspex that fit the groove are glued onto these parts, with a strong spray adhesive.

Some of the parts could be mounted with screws, straight onto the board.

In our case the board was a bit thin so a nut on the screw kept it from going through.

Some of the components did not line up with the back of the board, so to accurately portray their position we cut a piece of perspex and mounted them on there to show their position.

In order to display the parts that were closer together, like the filters, and to avoid having to mount them separately we spred them out like shown in picture and added extra layers of perspex in order to keep them there.

This creates a nice spread effect, that works well visually

To accurately show the layout of the relatively complex stand, we glued it on upright with hot glue.

Textured plastic parts were flatted using sandpaper, this obviously makes reassembly impossible but it works well visually.

for the metal parts, too heavy for glue, we used metal brackets that were then screwed into the board.