I’ve just finished getting my laptop set up the way I like it, including maximising the RAM and upgrading the screen. I opened it up to use it, and the screws on the hinge tore through the plastic.
To top it off, the plastic on the bottom of the laptop, the side that’s been removed here, has also broken.
My wife definitely didn’t drop the laptop while she was tidying up though…
EDIT: Apologies all, I’m having trouble with Lemmy today, and it’s not letting me reply.
I’ll try to reply tomorrow, but in the meantime;
It’s a Stonebook branded Clevo n751BU, a 7th gen i5. It’s held up respectably well until it appears to have been knocked in the corner where the hinge is. The plastics on both sides of the hinge have given out.
I’ve ordered a replacement base, but the palm rest which is pictured is not available anywhere that I can find. I’m going to dismantle the hinge to clean and oil it, then reassemble it slightly less tightly, and epoxy the screws into place. The reason for taking it apart in the first place was to add a third hard drive. It has an nvme drive, and I had two HDDs going spare that can hold my documents and music. They’re being synced now as I was having problems doing it remotely, but once they’re in they can be managed with Syncthing. The laptop shouldn’t need to come apart agin afterwards :)
I’ve been building and repairing computers and laptops for about 30 years, so I’m comfortable with completely stripping it, and can use it as an excuse to give everything a clean again. Short of replacing these HDDs with SSDs, there’s nothing else that can physically be upgraded, so I’m half tempted to glue it shut so that I don’t get tempted again :D
Laptop repair guy here! This problem is common in consumer grade laptops. As far as I am concerned, it’s purposefully weakly designed, because these break a LOT.
Not the hinge is broken, but the mounting points for the screws that keep the hinge in place. Sometimes it breaks on the bottom case, sometimes it breaks on the screen side.
We fix these issues regularly with epoxy (and massive skillz, lol). With most hinges, you can adjust the force a little lighter to relieve the pressure on the mounting points. That way it doesn’t fail again, after repair.
Machinist guy here!
Threads fail. Threads are generally the most likely thing to fail in any given mechanism. Generally, when the threads are expected to do more work than just sit there and not move, as in fastening a hinge for example, we try to make sure the threads are all the same kind of material.
I would never expect plastic threads to hold up to repeated use with an iron bolt inside. Something is going to give up, and it’s going to be the soft plastic threads, every single time.
Think about cheap as fuck IKEA furniture, any time they have a bolt to screw in, you install an insert first. We do the same thing in plastic, aluminum, shit even steel sometimes if we want the bolt to fail first.
I believe you misunderstood the problem, the threads are not usually the problem, the problem is the brass heat insert the hinge threads into, the insert just breaks off the plastic with the screw still threaded in, usually because the hinge is a bit too tight/rigid and puts a lot of force into the insert pulling it out
this seems to be the case in this picture as well
Is it possible that some hinges have hidden screws or use a different mechanism?
This is correct and good advice. I’d like to add that it’s also an option to glue in a threaded metal insert in case a self - tapping plastic screw was used and the original thread is stripped.
I just used the threaded metal inserts and seat them with the soldering iron to use orignal screws and have had great luck
Edit/ I should clarify that it’s been a few years since I’ve done one of these repairs and may not be the best option on a newer/slimmer model
Absolutely, if there is enough plastic left, melting is one of the best options. That also enables mending plastic by melting in metal pins or strips via a cheap plastic welder for 10 bucks (success can be great, but it’s highly dependent on the geometry and how things broke).
Edit: no, as I said, that’s absolutely fine if there is a chunk of sturdy plastic to accept the insert. I just wanted to present another plastic repair technique for the sake of completeness, if somebody stumbles into this comment section.
As far as I am concerned, it’s purposefully weakly designed, because these break a LOT.
Could be sacrificial because the plastic case is cheaper/easier to replace than whatever else would break instead of it were stronger.
No I think its just cheaper, if it was stronger you normally would have a metal plate or the entire base would be metal. The only time I have seen those fail was actually the hinges themselves and not the attachment points. If the metal plate or base somehow got severely damaged I doubt it would cost much more to repair and its still unlikely to damage anything else.
Yep, it’s the mounting point here. As someone pointed out below, the insert that holds the screw has ripped out of the plastic. The base of the laptop was already broken, so put extra pressure on this part.
I’m going to strip everything out and epoxy the inserts back in place, then epoxy over the bottom part of the hinge once the screws are in. The laptop should never need to be opened again, so a bit of overkill won’t hurt here.
I’m going to try to loosen the hinge slightly too, but it looks like a pin design rather than a screw, so it might just be a case of cleaning and lubing it instead.
Oh I hate these shitty joints that are designed to fail eventually. It’s just not made to last.
Counterpoint, sometimes stuff is designed to break so something else more critical of expensive to replace does not.
JB weld epoxy might be a good choice if you either don’t plan on replacing the screen again, or to recreate the holes and patch the cracks if you pull it all the way apart again. I did it to the back of a tv when the vesa screw mounts ripped and it held for another 5 years.
I’ve been looking at replacing the mounts with brass ones, but as it’s an old laptop, I should be able to get a replacement case for around £40. I don’t really want to spend any more, but if I can get the case I’m going to go down that route :)
This happened on a decent spec’d HP laptop I bought my mom a couple years back. No easy way to repair without ordering new hinges that were impossible to find and the PC repair shop quoted over $500 repair on a $700 laptop when it was new.
Now she just leaves the laptop open in the 180 degree position with the laptop being held into a stand & bungie cord strapped to it to prevent it from falling foward. It is now a desktop PC and no longer a laptop.
I assume she’s using a separate keyboard/mouse, right? Though I’m enjoying the mental picture of someone trying to touch type on a vertical keyboard.
I did not want to deal with the remote IT support of it all, so I plugged in a mouse/keyboard and a second monitor to make it more like a desktop PC setup, lol.
I was debating doing something similar, and putting it behind the TV to replace the Fire Stick, but I’ve found what looks like compatible plastics on ebay. My base has broken quite badly too, so replacing both is going to be my best bet.
Daft question, but have you tried ebay for the hinges, or a spares or repairs listing?
I gave it a very short search back when it broke last year. I went with the cheapest way to get it back up and running which was just convert it to a desktop. She never goes anywhere with a laptop in the first place so there was no need to make it portable again.
She’s retired and just used it to surf the web. A Chromebook would work perfectly for her if she was not dead set of having Excel for her recipes and bill tracking.
HP by chance? Had this happen to a 360 HP laptop (and I almost never used that functionality!), repaired by replacing the backside of screen where it screws in. This of course required disassembling the whole damn laptop. I was horrified by how cheap it was and now have a ThinkPad T480.
