Restoring 30 inch Cinema Display
by aran
A couple of years some thieves figured the best way to disconnect an €1800 30″ Apple Cinema Display was by cutting the video cable. Since then, the screen has been sitting defunct in a corner, taking up space. Today, I decided to at least have a go at repairing the beast.
The 24 pin DVI cable was cut off pretty clean, about 10 cm from the connector. The other end wasn’t too long either, as about 20 cm from the cut the DVI cable merges with an USB, Firewire and power cable to join into one big cable that goes right into the monitor. Replacing the entire cable would require taking apart the monitor, which is sealed shut. For a while I figured I would break open the DVI connector and re-attach it. But God knows what I would have found inside there. If anything, probably very little room to use a soldering iron. So I decided to strip the insulation of both ends and solder them together.
Following are a couple of pictures of the process:
Above: the piece with the DVI connector, stripped. After removing the outer insulation I found the shielding; woven silver coloured wire. After that a thin layer of insulation, and then 7 sets of three wires and 5 individual wires. The sets of three wires consisted of a wire with white insulation, a wire with coloured insulation, and a wire without insulation, and the sets themselves were insulated again. I found it is important to keep track of the three-wire sets, if you want to know which white wire to connect to which.
Above: the piece connected to the screen, stripped.
Above: my not-so-fine soldering work. It may not look good, but as long as all the connections are sound, I’m happy.
Above: Insulating. At least as tedious a job as the soldering. When stripping the wires of their insulation, I didn’t realize that I would have to insulate the entire length of the three-wire sets, since they include one wire without insulation.
Above: Insulating is done! It actually doesn’t even look half bad.
Above: Shielding. Carrying a digital signal over incredibly thin wires, one can imagine interference being a problem. As mentioned, the cable was well shielded, with woven wire all around. This was the bit that I probably could have done a better job at. My plan was to have the copper wire (stripped speaker cable) completely surrounding the weld, but that would have required me to strip quite a lot of speaker wire, by hand. So I settled for this. Somewhat of a Faraday cage, I hope.
And… surprise, surprise, the thing actually works!
The connection is pretty solid as a whole, with several layers of tape (more added after the above picture was taken). The only thing that might still pose a problem is interference, and individual wires or welds breaking up. So, no guarantees.