- HammerPhone
- The Hammer Phone was part experiment, part product of bordom gone out of control, part imitation.
- The experimentation part is with Rust-Oleum Hammered Black Spray Paint that my brother had been using for one of his refinishing projectm and it so happened that he had some left over when he was finished. The part of boredom gone bad is a few weeks when saying I had nothing to do would be an understatement. I've been living in a painfuly small, overpriced rental house in a fairly crumby part of town after my move (that will be remedied soon after I post this). The miitation is because of one of Dr. Bob's superhuman like mods, a Nokia Cell Phone (usualy a fellow Mac Hacker like myself). In the mod he takes his phone and swaps out every one of the SMT LEDs, which he said is like "soldering grains of sand", that mod can be found here. Unfortunatly I haven't gotten around to ordering any 0603 packege LEDs to put into this mod (they will be blue, what else goes well with techno black?)
- As is needed for any truly good paint job, I opted for a total dissesembly, which was supprisingly easy. I shouldn't even bother with illustraiting the take apart for such an old phone (Nokia 918p) but since I shot the film I'll go ahead and post it.
- First off is remove the battery. If you can't do this, put down the phone and never touch a cell phone again, better yet don't touch any electronics with a battery again. But if your like me and that just inspired you push down on the button and slid it out.
- Now that the battery is out you're going to have to remove 6 screws, all of them a with a small torx head (6 I think, maybe 8) I got a set of small plastic handled screw drivers from wallmart with small torx heads and it works fine for these small electronics. But anyways, 2 are holding the small piece of plastic with "nokia" engraved on it the other 4 are holding the electronics in place. To paint the phone plastics these are the only screws you have to remove so put them aside, perferably somewhere where you won't loose them.
- Now remove the electronics. They are attached to the speaker, so you need to fold it out to the right (looking from the battery side of the phone). Then pry the connector out carefuly. This will free the electronics and you can set them aside. You'll also want to remove the plastic buttons, the white sheet that are the numerical pad and the power button. Again set these aside unless you want to paint them.
- Remember that these are delicate electronics, with ICs. So make sure you store them in an antistatic materal, I just used a memory storage bag I had laying around.
- Now you've finished take apart, and you should have a thin faceplate, the battery, and a small piece with "NOKIA" engraved on it that you want to paint. Some people won't want to paint the battery but I'll deal with this in a moment.
- Unless you have x-ray vision you don't want that screen being painted, and to be brutaly honest with you I don't have xray vision. I also did this at the spur of the moment and didn't have a ton of painting supplies on me. No problem, I just used some clear tape. two or three strips on the screen and a little egding with a sharp knife and I was ready to paint the main part, how ever this still left the battery, and I wasn't in the mood to do a partial mod.
- This wasn't even needed, but to quoite a wise individual "better safe than sorry" and if the paint did slip down to the contacts I didn't want to deal with it. A couple pieces of clear tape worked fine here as well.
- I don't have any painting photos, but what ever you use make sure it works with plastics and RTFM. Easy enough, and cheaper, to do it right rather than twice. I laid down two coats if I remember right, and then let it sit overnight. Then I came back to reassemble, but first I had to take off the masking.
- I used a thin, nearly knife like flat head screw drive to probe for the tape edges then just pealed it off. And it looked fine.
- With the masking removed, and the paint dried all I had to do was reassemble, basicaly take apart in revece, just make sure the keys are in. The power button is small and doesn't attach to anything and the key pad can come up on its own. Nothing major tho'. Also make sure you reconnect the speaker. Just as a side note I did come back later and hit it with a glossy clear coat for extra protection, but I didn't mask anything off. The plus to this is that it got rid of a few of the nasty scratches the phone had in the beginning.
- Now that its reassembled and looking great make sure you didn't kill it. I didn't care about the phone in the first place as it was from an old service and most places probably won't service it anyways.
- The next step for this phone is changing the LEDs to blue, and then seeing about service for it. Still its a fun little project that helped save my sanity.
