I started with the thinner pieces of plastic and worked my way up to slightly thicker pieces of plastic. The laminating pouch offcuts were quite good particularly for going around the corners. This worked surprisingly well, you could grab the plastic offcut, stick it in and work it up and down cutting away at the adhesive. I then used a ruler to measure 9mm in from the edges of these plastic offcuts and then ruled them out as lines with permanent marker, this way I’d know how deep I could or couldn’t cut.
![upgrade imac 27 late 2013 upgrade imac 27 late 2013](https://barefeats.com/images13/maxssd1.gif)
I had offcuts from some A4 Laminating that I had done earlier in the week, I had a peek through the recycle bin and cut squares off some scrap plastic, this was in the form of old containers, strawberry punnet boxes, milk bottles, soft drink bottles, etc. I decided to put an array of various thickness plastics together and use them instead. This could be relatively easily solved by looking at the gap between the iMac Aluminium Chassis and the Display. The information that I had was that you couldn’t cut more then ‘3/8 of an Inch’ which equates to ‘9.5mm’, the information that I didn’t have was how thick their cutter was. iFixIt doesn’t ship to Australia and their Australian Store didn’t stock the tool, a few cheaper alternates existed on eBay but they were like $20 or required a three week wait for it to be shipped from China, expensive or delayed wasn’t an option.īasically the tool that iFixIt offers is a pre-cut wheel that is a specific size so that when used like a pizza cutter around the iMac Display will cut just the right amount to remove the adhesive but not damage any internal components. What got me curious is the term ‘different tool’, what is a different tool? The only option discussed is the ‘ iMac Opening Tool‘. You risk severing antenna cables and causing serious damage’. If using a different tool, insert no more than 3/8″ into the display. On the iFixIt Tutorial it states this warning right from the get go ‘The hub on the iMac Opening Tool will keep you from pushing the wheel in too far. One of the first friction points that I stumbled across is in the very first step, removing the display. The points I will be discussing here are more of a DIY approach to what is on offer at iFixIt. I used the iFixIt Tutorial for this repair and I would have been stuck without it. While I will be discussing some alternates to the tools that iFixIt recommend, I still 100% support their work. The team at EveryMac give a solid overview of the model here. It’s Model Identifier is ‘iMac 14,2’ and it might also be referenced as ‘A1419’ or ‘EMC 2639’. The iMac Model that I will be referencing in this tutorial is the ‘ Late 2013 27′ iMac‘.