Today I will be walking you through a laptop hinge replacement on an ASUS F3J laptop. As usual I purchased the replacement hinges from eBay for $11 including shipping to Australia. You can only buy a pair of left and right hinges, so you can choose to replace both.
I also purchased a pair of plastic hinge covers from eBay for a relatively expensive $14 including shipping to Australia, I could have probably saved some money and used my existing ones with a bit of glue since the clips had broken.
First a photo of the damaged hinge, you can see the right hinge sheared off completely which is quite dangerous as the associate cables should easily be damaged further. Further, you will notice that there is no plastic hinge cover. The left hinge was fine and still holding the screen in place, but I suspected it may have been weakened by the rotational torque so replaced it as well.
Replacing the hinges are fairly straight forward, first remove two sets of screws on the back of the back of the laptop as per the photo below.
Turn the laptop upside down and remove a screw holding the left hinge in place from the bottom.
Turn the laptop back to its normal position and open the screen to an obtuse angle exposing the plastic hinge covers. Remove these by slightly compressing them and pulling on the back side first.
Once these are removed the hinges are visible. This was already the case for my broken right hinge.
Remove the two screws holding the hinges to the laptop, once removed you should be able to remove the LCD screen from the laptops base completely, be careful though as the data cables would still be connected. You can easily disconnect these cables, this frees the LCD screen a little more except for a single pair of wires which doesn’t seem to look like it was easy to disconnect.
Now with the screen removed from the base, remove the eight rubber screw caps exposing the screws. With a Philips screwdriver remove the eight screws.
With the eight screws remove the surrounding plastic bezel can be removed exposing the LCD screen.
From here remove another set of four screws holding the LCD screen assembly on the plastic backing.
Finally, remove four small screws from either side of the LCD screen.
You should now have the two hinges removed. This is the same procedure if you want to replace the LCD screen. Install the new hinges by following the above instructions in reverse.
To reinstall those rubber screw caps a drop of glue may be required to hold them in place.
Once the hinges are installed, installed the plastic hinge covers and you’re done.
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