I have a Toshiba Satellite C55t-A5218 touchscreen laptop, and the rubber seal around the edge of the digitizer is deteriorating. It's sticky and crumbling apart and making a mess. The digitizer and screen are both fine. Short of replacing the digitizer ($$$), does anyone have any tricks for removing the deteriorated rubber and replacing or refitting it with something else? I would rather not put a lot of money into it if there's other alternatives to replacing the digitizer. Any ideas are welcome.
Toshiba Satellite touchscreen rubber
britechguy
Well-Known Member
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That really depends on "how pretty" you care the end result is.
It is relatively easy to stabilize the crumbling by using a fine brush with the really liquid version of superglue applied, sparingly, to the rubber so that the deteriorating stuff is "bonded back together." This tends to hold for quite a while.
If it's still sticky after that (sometimes the cyanoacrylate will form a very thin crust such that you don't have the stickiness anymore) you can use latex paint to go over the rubber to create a tack-free surface.
I have an ancient Garmin nuvi 755T that decided to go "the full tacky" route that I salvaged with two coats of matte black latex paint. Those have held up very well. I'm just careful to avoid doing anything that might cause a gouge or scrape, removing that protective layer. I couldn't even stand to touch the device for a while, and almost pitched it before trying this as a last ditch effort, and it worked.
It is relatively easy to stabilize the crumbling by using a fine brush with the really liquid version of superglue applied, sparingly, to the rubber so that the deteriorating stuff is "bonded back together." This tends to hold for quite a while.
If it's still sticky after that (sometimes the cyanoacrylate will form a very thin crust such that you don't have the stickiness anymore) you can use latex paint to go over the rubber to create a tack-free surface.
I have an ancient Garmin nuvi 755T that decided to go "the full tacky" route that I salvaged with two coats of matte black latex paint. Those have held up very well. I'm just careful to avoid doing anything that might cause a gouge or scrape, removing that protective layer. I couldn't even stand to touch the device for a while, and almost pitched it before trying this as a last ditch effort, and it worked.
