Mighty Jabba
Well-known member
I’ve been working on restoring a number of clamshell iBooks recently. In some cases they required some minor repairs such as resoldering the power port, but for the most part they all worked fine with the exception of the very noisy hard disks, which I am replacing with SSDs. Most of them were also missing their Apple logos, though, which is a bit of a problem considering that the main appeal of these computers is how they look. So I took it upon myself to try and replace them. This turned out to be a bit more of a challenge than I first thought.
I do a fair amount of 3D printing and just happened to have a resin-based 3D printer, so the first thing that came to mind was using that, but I never really got it to work satisfactorily. Even just getting the shape so that it would fit inside the indentation on the lid was harder than I thought. I started by taking a photo of the logo and converting it to a 3D object, but it was always subtly off, and resizing didn’t really help. Also, I bought some orange resin in the hopes that it would work for the Tangerine iBook, but it never had the right look.
So I decided to try doing it manually with polyester resin and dyes. Basically this entailed mixing up the resin in what I thought would be the right color, and then pouring it into the logo indentation in a junk screen cover I had. Getting the right color was tricky, as was working with the resin, which is pretty nasty stuff, but in the end I got some that I am more or less satisfied with. The main issue is that when the resin hardens, it leaves a bit of an “orange peel” ripple on the surface instead of being smooth like I had expected. Ideally I would make some kind of silicone mold, but at this point I’m going to call it good. I was hoping it might be possible to make these available to others, but it’s just too much work.
Has anyone else had success replacing these logos?
I do a fair amount of 3D printing and just happened to have a resin-based 3D printer, so the first thing that came to mind was using that, but I never really got it to work satisfactorily. Even just getting the shape so that it would fit inside the indentation on the lid was harder than I thought. I started by taking a photo of the logo and converting it to a 3D object, but it was always subtly off, and resizing didn’t really help. Also, I bought some orange resin in the hopes that it would work for the Tangerine iBook, but it never had the right look.
So I decided to try doing it manually with polyester resin and dyes. Basically this entailed mixing up the resin in what I thought would be the right color, and then pouring it into the logo indentation in a junk screen cover I had. Getting the right color was tricky, as was working with the resin, which is pretty nasty stuff, but in the end I got some that I am more or less satisfied with. The main issue is that when the resin hardens, it leaves a bit of an “orange peel” ripple on the surface instead of being smooth like I had expected. Ideally I would make some kind of silicone mold, but at this point I’m going to call it good. I was hoping it might be possible to make these available to others, but it’s just too much work.
Has anyone else had success replacing these logos?
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