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You are here: Home / Archives for lenovo

T420 Smooth Surface Touchpad

2016/01/02 by sudo

So, I’ve been repairing some Lenovo T420 laptops recently and a few of them have had really worn touchpads. Unlike the older generation of Thinkpads, the T420 has little dots all over the touchpad, giving it a textured finish.

W520 Touchpad

Textured Touchpad

I’m not quite sure what the design motivation was behind this, but they seem to wear off quickly, leaving the touchpad looking quite unsightly. One of the T420’s actually had a smooth area in the centre of the touchpad that all the dimples had worn off from, which gave me an idea. I wonder if you can simply scrape off the textured dimples?

T420 Smooth Finish Touchpad

T420 Smooth Finish Touchpad

In order to remove the textured surface from the touchpad, you’ll need something ridged but not abrasive. A knife is not a good idea. Use something like a finger nail or old bank card and carefully scratch a the surface layer of the touchpad. On my first attempt this was easy, the dimples had erroded in the centre allowing me to start from there and work outwards towards the edges of the touchpad. I’d assume if the touchpad isn’t in such bad condition simply using friction would yield the same results. By the time I’d finished I had a smooth touchpad, similar to that of the T500 range. There was some leftover glue residue which can be removed using furniture polish sprayed onto a cloth or kitchen towel and gently rubbed over the affected area.

An alternative to this is you can buy replacement touchpad stickers with the texture on eBay or similar – searching for “T420 touchpad” seemed to return plenty of results.

Filed Under: Guides, Technology Tagged With: hacks, laptops, lenovo, t420

Repairing a ThinkPad style rubberised finish

2015/09/17 by sudo

Lenovo ThinkPads traditionally have a rubberised finish on the outer casing of the screen. My T500 is pushing 5 years old now, and the corners are warn away to the plastic beneath, so I have started looking into rapairing or replacing the rubberised finish on the laptop. After doing some googling I found people reccomending plasti-dip, which is a spray on finish that appears rubberised but can be peeled off as a thin film of plastic. Plasti-dip is available in the UK, but quite expensive and I’m not sure how well a “peelable” finish would work on a laptop.

Plasti-dip is intended for use on cars, which got me thinking about things like truck bed liner so I took a trip to Halfords (for those not in the UK, Halfords is a big chain of car and bike stores generally thought of as expensive but quick-and-easy). I ended up picking up black underseal and on a recommendation from a friend underseal for cars.

Lenovo ThinkPads rubberised finish is a matt black and quite resistant – the texture generates friction – while appearing quite smooth. I pulled out a scrap laptop from the collection that hasn’t made it to the computer graveyard yet and sprayed it in half; one side underseal the other bedliner.

Truck bedliner paint

Truck bedliner paint

The bedliner was much harder to get an even coat on, and even after several hours it wasn’t completely dry. It has a much coarser texture to it, making it a little unpleasant to handle the laptop but it does feel far more substantial in terms of the amount of protection it provides and the strenght of it.

The underseal came out a dark grey, not black, but was far easier to coat consistently. It’s actually a pretty close match to the Lenovo ThinkPad rubberised texture – so much so I had to get my ThinkPad out and put them side to side in order to spot the difference.

Car Underseal

Car Underseal

I’m now wondering about doing something with both paints using a stencil – but probably not something for my precious T500. For it, I’m looking at either using a light abrasive like oven cleaner to take off all of the rubberised finish, taping off the display lights, hinges and logo before respraying the whole thing in underseal or trying to touch up the areas that are affected.

 

side by side comparison

side by side comparison of underseal and truck bed liner on an old laptop

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: lenovo, t500, thinkpad

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