Greg In The Desert

When I bought this house, the first thing I worked on was the kitchen. I had hoped that I could keep the cabinets and refinish them up but they were in too bad of shape. I didn’t have a lot of money. I installed the majority of the cabinets that I could afford, plus I needed to do some construction before I could put all of them up. I used the Mills Pride brand from Home depot.

Here we are a year and a half later and I’ve have some money to put up more cabinets. Home Depot is apparently not carrying Mills Pride anymore, in fact Mills Pride’s website says it’s under construction. I’m not about to trash the cabinets I already put in and start over, so I decided to use some open shelving.

There’s an area between the microwave and the wall I plan to nock down. I’m dying to nock down this wall, but I’m not quite ready yet. I really need some shelving here to hold food related stuff when I’m cooking. My “pantry” was next to my sink, which was an original cabinet and a pain to access. By placing open shelving in both of these locations I can easily access things that I use frequently and hide the rest in normally closed cabinet. I like steel wire shelving. Normally shelving like this is expensive so I used less expensive shelving normally used for closets and made them adjustable.

So far it’s working out much better than I imagined. Having the extra cabinet space and having easy access to spices while still having them off the counter has been terrific. Cost of materials for 3 shelves 27 inches long, 3 shelves 31 inches long, 12 brackets and 4 wall mounts was about $80.

I’ve had trouble buring CD’s and DVD’s for sometime, basically I couldn’t get through a burn without a error. I came to the conculsion that it was a problem with dirt and not a software problem. I have read on the Apple discussion board of people having the exact same problem with the the full size superdrive but no one with the problem on a powerbook. I tried using the disc cleaners you can buy in the store. It solved my girlfriends Flower Power iMac disc burning problem but it had no effect on mine. I read that many people had to take their (full size) superdrives apart to clean them. This is apparently what I needed to do to my Powerbooks drive. I haven’t seen anyone else that has done this so I though I would document it.

My (15″ 1 Ghz) powerbook, the first model with a superdrive, has been with me for about 2 years now and I plan to have it last me till the G5’s come out. So I figured if I killed it I could buy a replacement from OWC.

If you try this you do so at your own risk. Don’t blame me if you kill your machine. You have been warned.

There are two brackets attached to each side of the superdrive which prevents it from coming apart, you have to take those off. To do so you need to remove several wires and 2 circuit boards. It looks pretty messy but turns out not to be so hard. You will need a T8 & T6 along with a phillips head screw driver. I also suggest having a pair of tweezers for manipulating some of the smaller parts.

Take the bottom cover of the Powerbook off. There are six T8 screws.

Once you have it’s underbelly exposed you will want to remove the black bracket between the hard drive and the DVD drive (2 screws). Then remove all the flex cables (3). I found the main drive flex a little difficult to remove, use caution. Don’t wreck your main board trying to get it off. There are also two regular wire connectors. One is obvious but the other one is somewhat hidden under the black cover of the circuit board (tweezers come in handy here).

Once you have all the wiring out you can wiggle the drive out. There will be a rubber boot over a post on the right back of the drive. Carefully maneuver the drive out of this area. Then you will need to take the right bracket off. Keep track of the rubber boot.

Now you need to take the two circuit boards off the left hand bracket. There are two T6 screws on each board.

The front circuit board will come right off but the back one will have a flex circuit that will need to be carefully maneuvered through the bracket.

Once those two circuit boards are freed you can remove the bracket. There are two phillips screws holding the bracket on. Remove them. Note that one of them is a flush mount, the circuit board that goes in this space won’t fit unless you put the right screw back here.

At this point you should have all the pieces off the drive and you can start surgery on the drive itself.

Remove 4 phillips screws from the drive. I had no stickers or anything keeping the top from coming off once it was freed. You will need to carefully make sure the front bezel come off the top cover. There’s no reason you should break those tabs tabs taking it off. The top cover kind of hinges off the one side, don’t force anything trying to take it off.

Now the guts are exposed. I used a can of air to blow out the inside (there was visible dirt inside mine). I also used a optical grade lint free cloth to clean the lens itself.

That’s it. Follow the steps in reverse to put it back together (you did keep track of your screws, didn’t you?)