Disassembling an LCD panel

With so much talk on the forum lately about failed backlights I thought I would take one of the cracked 14" LCD screens apart which I have laying around just to see what the guts look like.  Boy was I surprised. The process requires removing about 8 screws and prying up protective plastic and foil which holds the circuit board and other stuff in place.  The LCD panel itself consists of about 4 or 5 different layers of material most real thin but a thick plastic next to last from the front face of the screen which seems to be the business part.  It makes me wonder if a non-cracked front layer could be installed over the rest of the layers to make a good screen. There are no electrical attachments to any of the layers. They all appear to be held together by pressure and then the circuit board at the top where the LCD ribbon cable attaches presses against the layers making electrical contact.

 

The backlight is a real tiny dude. It runs almost the full length of the LCD and the lamp itself it about 2mm in diameter (a bit less than 3/16" for our non-metric friends). It fits in sort of a flimsy metal cage with wires coming out which go to a plug which fits into the inverter.  I removed the backlight and it is sitting here on the desk.

 

I'm sure I could replace the backlight if that were the problem, but whether or not I could reassemble the whole thing and get it working normally is an unknown.  The manufacturers use special double sided very thin foam tape and also very thin (sticky one side) aluminum foil to seal everything up and hold it together. If one were to get into the business of replacing backlights he or she would need a supply of this or similar material.  Very hard to remove parts stuck down with it and not destroy the foam in the removal process and definitely not worth the preservation effort if you had new replacement material.

 

Next time you run across a cracked LCD take it apart! It was not anywhere near as complicated as I thought it would be to get it apart.  Not saying anything at all about getting it back together.  I did find one screw hidden under some foil on one side, but it was fairly obvious something in that area was holding that one side from coming apart.

 

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