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Give me back the rim! (low profile soft rim trackpoint mod) *pictures*

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micrex22
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Give me back the rim! (low profile soft rim trackpoint mod) *pictures*

#1 Post by micrex22 » Sun Jul 09, 2017 12:58 am

It's time for operation: 'give me back that soft rim and defy China's lenovo!'
That means of course, hacking an exsiting soft rim.
First the assessment.

As we can see, the 2nd generation IBM trackpoint caps are about 2x the height of the lenovo low profile (and the soft rim was the 'tallest' of them all):
http://i.imgur.com/M89NgZW.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/QJa2pQU.jpg

After cutting the soft rim down it measures the same in height, however, because of the 'rim' part, there's less depth:
http://i.imgur.com/pn45Edm.jpg
What I mean by less depth is that the hole goes down further on the standard low profile cap because it doesn't have an indented 'rim'. However, upon placing the cap in the assembly, the lid closes without a problem, and it fits just fine:
http://i.imgur.com/USV44VO.jpg

I used Hakko CH-170 precision cutters to cut at the rubber, tried a knife at first but it didn't work well at all.

Ha! That's probably the first time a 'soft rim' has been placed on an X1 Carbon 4th gen. And it even makes the all-so-familiar 'rim' mark on the screen that many T6x owners know and love, but so does the other standard one too / so now we have a combination of both marks:
http://i.imgur.com/asn0gzc.jpg

Now down to the problem at hand... we need to fill in the extra space so that the cap fits on the lenovo stick. I thought about three ways of doing this.

#1 simply gluing the trackpoint cap and lenovo stem together--this of course will void your warranty and potentially damage the keyboard in the event you need to remove it. Not at all optimal... especially since I DO replace these things as they wear out or get dirty.
#2 inject the trackpoint cap with glue and then somehow cut out the hole... the problem is it would never be a perfect fit and potentially introduce a wobble--not to mention cutting a perfect square would be hard due to how delicate the operate is.
#3 getting seran wrap, covering the trackpoint stem with it, then injecting glue into the trackpoint cap and inserting it on top of the trackpoint stick to set. Once dried, it can be removed along with the seran wrap and you'll presumably have a perfect fit--excess seran wrap could be cut away.

I'm presently trying out option #3 with the seran wrap... hopefully it works out okay. If anyone has any other ideas, feel free to post them!

Thinkpad4by3
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Re: Give me back the rim! (low profile soft rim trackpoint mod) *pictures*

#2 Post by Thinkpad4by3 » Sun Jul 09, 2017 8:23 am

Would you like a 3D printed Adapter?
Thinkpad4by3's Law of the Universe.

The efficiency of two screens equally sized with equal numbers if pixels are equal. The time spent by a 4:3 user complaining about 16:9 is proportional to the inefficiency working with a 16:9 display, therefore the amount of useful work extracted is equal.

saoto28
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Dec 17, 2017 7:21 pm
Location: Okinawa, Japan

Re: Give me back the rim! (low profile soft rim trackpoint mod) *pictures*

#3 Post by saoto28 » Fri Mar 09, 2018 7:42 am

Hi, micrex22.
How was it going?

In my case, I'd inserted a soft plastic block in a soft rim after cutting, at first.
https://twitter.com/saoto28/status/923374141708820480

After that, finaly, I made 3d printed soft rim itself for super low profile.
https://twitter.com/saoto28/status/929302240841539585

It's working well.

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