Putting it all together

Getting the LCD mounted in precisely the right spot wasn’t easy. I was using 3M strips for this and just eye-balling the right spot for the height and width of the screen to be perfectly aligned with the acrylic viewport. I’d rather have some sort of bracket that this LCD could fit into that would then allow me to attach it to the standoffs the original LCD panel used, but that’s beyond me at this point. (My 3D printing set up doesn’t quite work correctly at the moment.)

Pro tip: Don’t use long 3M strips for doing this! There’s repositioning that will likely be required and you have to be able to lift up and reposition the screen if needed. Just little 1” long pieces, perhaps four across the entire length of the LCD top and bottom edges, will be enough.

Here’s the whole thing ready to be married together:

Don’t be alarmed by all the black tape. It has nothing to do with actually holding the LCD in place on the case, it is only for keeping the ribbon cable and the controller board in place so they don’t move around as the two halves are put together.

I would like to come up with a better way for all of this, and I might eventually, but I don’t really see much need to open up this case very much anyway and it may just stay like this and be fine for a while.

After snapping the two halves together and screwing in the four case screws, I finally booted it up for the first time as a completely put together machine:

That’s the Cinnamon graphical desktop environment

The Firefox browser rendering my Web8201 website

The project had quite a few challenges but overall I’m happy with it. I’m able to use a tiny wireless Logitech mouse with it and it functions quite well as a useful Linux machine. The firefox browser works fine, and I can do anything I want in multiple terminal windows without issue.

If anyone out there is feeling inspired and crazy enough to try to do this with your own dead machine, I would encourage you to read through Belsamber’s Blog first as he has lots of extra detail on things that I didn’t cover here.

Also, I’ll give a similar disclaimer as he did: There might be people out there that feel it’s sacrilegious to do something like this to a 1980’s vintage laptop. I agree with that actually, if what you’re doing is taking an otherwise perfectly working machine and effectively destroying it. That wasn’t the case here.

I have dozens of Model T machines in my possession of all of the variants which I still like to use from time to time, and this seemed to be a worthy project to resurrect a machine whose motherboard met an untimely end from the beak of an avian monster. :)

This little machine is useful for a lot of things, and is quite the conversation starter.

Cheers,
Gary