Please help! I dropped my box. :-(

[Hot Soup!]

Hi everyone,

I have some questions.

Picture 1 (bottom left corner of my W520 got busted open, so did the smart card reader, I think. A small piece of plastic fell off after I took a picture.):


Picture 2 (look closely. A crack on the left side. And I can apparently push in my Thinkpad's bottom into the palmrest?):


Picture 3 (Some nasty bending of the plastic on the bottom left corner):


So... is this repairable? Is there anything I can do to fix it? And if not, is my W520 in need of a trip to the computer repair shop?

EDIT: By the way, the laptop boots. Everything seems to be running fine. Left and right speakers work. The HDD hasn't been damaged (phew! Haven't made a backup in months).

[brchan]

You may still be able to 'pop' the palmrest back into place by removing its screws and reseating it.The hardware manual (HMM) is available at the top of this page, or on lenovo's site.The damage seems isolated and mostly cosmetic. There does not seem to be a crack on the bottom case right below the palmrest area, just scuffing.

If you don't like the look of things, then you can certainly replace the palmrest (easy) and even the base cover (little more work) if it really bothers you.

[thinkpadcollection]

T520 and W520 parts (magnesium cage if broken, palmrest and bottom cover) share all same parts. Not expensive to do from ebay.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[BillMorrow]

AND, just to set your mind at rest, i haqve a thinkpad, 760 (a very old model) that was sent sailing across bangkok airport at one time, dropped many times, has every part broken or torn away or otherwise missing, yet this thinkpad still works after 20 years and all that damage..
well, it did 8 years ago which was the last time i powered it nup..

point is they WILL take a licking and keep on ticking to borrow a phrase from timex..

so unless the cosmetic issues bother you i would not worry.. in fact it is a badge of just how hardy a thinkpad can be..

[Saucey]

Heard a story with pictures about how a W520 had fell from a car roof or hood and still worked well despite its visual condition.

Purely cosmetic, I'd wager removing the keyboard and bezels to make sure none pieces of the rollcage is loose inside your machine if you want to make sure.
We got the hardware maintenance manuals, all you would need is a Philips screwdriver, it doesn't have to be a pricey precise one either.
You should be fine unless you put a screw in the wrong place, but even then you'll 'feel' it as the wrong one.
Its time to tear it apart and rebuild!

[Hot Soup!]

Heya folks,

Good news! After a busy two weeks, I finally got around to fixing my W520! But before I did, I looked over my W520's driver's operating manual and watched a video of a complete disassembly on Youtube.

After that... well, basically, what I did was:
Partly disassemble my W520.
Reseated the palmrest.
Removed and observed the keyboard and surrounding parts for anything amiss (thanks Saucey!).
Found out that a small portion of the lid was popped open. Squeezed the area where it popped gently so that it would pop back in again.
Apply superglue to the crack located on my Thinkpad's bottom.
Covered the damage (a hole) on the bottom-left of corner with some epoxy putty.
Reassemble and made sure not to overtighten screws.
Booted into Windows to see if everything came out all right (yep).

... Whew. The whole procedure turned out to be a lot easier than I thought.

And to anyone wondering, the damage is indeed cosmetic; so far, after two weeks of normal use, I haven't encountered any system errors, hardware failures, or anything of a similar nature. Everything works as it should.

Thanks all!