I love to teach my son how to ride and repair stuffs the old fashion way. Here I will share some of our cheap DIY projects and repairs. I will also share some of my experience as a biker and as a pro mechanic. I am not a mechanic anymore but I still do repairs but mostly for my own machineries and this is why I try to keep everything easy and cheap. I also don't race anymore but I still love riding up the mountains where there is little or no help and all I can rely on is my small tool pouch and my monkey repair skills to bring me home whenever my bike or my friends bike breaks down.

If you are a tech-wiz or some kind of high-tech repair guru who likes spending too much $$$s buying stuffs and spends most of your time at a coffee shop posing your best biker battle gear clown costume and talking how great a biker you are then THIS IS NOT FOR YOU... Here we seriously ride our bikes and we try to keep everything simple, easy and cheap. Most of what I will share here are intended for riders who usually break their bikes to peices and may not be needed by other bikers.

I will also be sharing some cheap ways how I repaired my cars and computers. And for laughs, I will also add some weird / funny / odd stuffs that I or we did that worked and didn't work. Sorry about this blog's style, set-up or whatever you may call it, I'm an old school biker and its easier for me wrenching cars and bikes than typing on my keyboard...

Sunday, September 1, 2013

iPhone 4 Home Button DIY Quick Fix.




This quick fix might not be appropriate for this blog but since I use my iPhone's map a lot, I will share my DIY fix here in hope that fellow bikers could benefit from this somehow... 
This is my iPhone 4 and it has been with me for more than two years. My two year Softbank contract is finished and could upgrade to an iPhone 5 but since it is still working I will stick with it until a newer version comes up :) Anyway, the problem was an unresponsive home button which really got me annoyed especially when I'm on a bike and looking at the map. I've tried many DIY fix that I got from the web including the complete restore, opening an apple app and rebooting, etc. I also tried using the AssistiveTouch but I find it annoying. There are two fix that worked, one is the rubbing alcohol method and the pushing the USB charger/cable towards the screen but these only worked for a few hours for me and it was quite annoying when the home button becomes unresponsive again.

My DIY fix is a no brainer and the photos tells it all. I have been using it for a few days and all seems good and my home button feels like new. Since the home button becomes responsive when I use the USB charger/cable fix, all I had to do is to stick some layers of electrical tape on the USB connector socket and close the back panel. What this does is that the back panel pushes the USB connector towards the screen but permanently. Now I don't have to pry my USB cable to make the home button responsive again. It is like adding a spacer or washer on a bolt when we are doing some dodgy bike repairs, lol! This worked for me and I hope this could also work for you. Just remember to use only a fair amount of electrical tape thickness or you might end up breaking the USB connector or the back panel :) Another thing is that I didn't have the small torx driver for the back panel screws and just used a small flat driver used for eyeglasses.

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My iPhone's Sleep/Wake Button also became unresponsive several months ago but also used a similar fix and it is still working now and without problems :) 

I have been reading and hearing lots of similar complains with iPhone from the web and from our friends. My wife's iPhone 4S speaker jack died 2 days after when she just got it and WIFI died several moths ago, my son's iPhone 4 is become unresponsive, friends iPhone suffering from similar problems... I just couldn't understand why the newer iPhone seems more weaker than the old iPhones. I gave my old iPhone 3G to my buddy and it is still working... Now I'm thinking about shifting to Android but the problem with Android is that they are expensive compared to iPhone, when I can get a new iPhone for basically free.





Posted by iWrench at 9:26 PM

2 comments:

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  2. iWrenchSeptember 13, 2013 at 3:34 PM

    Thank you very much :)

    ReplyDelete

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