After 3 days of taking the Macbook apart, spraying it, watching paint dry…then putting it all back together, it came with some pitfalls and it was quite costly.

I have upgraded my MacBook with 4gb and two hard drives. I got rid of the cd drive to make space for second hard drive which holds all my data and l use the primary drive which is used for the operating system. Primary drive is an 128gb OCZ vertex 2 and the secondary drive is a 320gb Western Digital Scorpio Blue. Both with excellent benchmarks in testing. I do want to upgrade the ram from 4gb to 8gb, l hear many people have tried this and the Macbook can handle it.

First process was to start taking it apart. Not praising too much, but they do an excellent job making these laptops. The screws are so small and they hold each component in place securely. The keyboard screws were very tedious, they must have been approx 5mm in length. They were tiny! There must have been over 30 screws holding the keyboard together alone!

Now, the hardest part was removing the glass that protects the screen. In order to remove it, you have to heat the edges of the screen with a heat gun and then pry it open using a scraper. I thought l had heated it up enough to melt the adhesive, when prying it open l chipped the glass. It wasn’t enjoyable seeing that, so l ended up searching on eBay for a new one, which came in 2 days.

Once stripped down, it had to be cleaned thoroughly before it could take the primer coat. In between the primer coat a light sanding using a 2000 grit sanding paper needed to be done so the finish could be smooth before the final finish.

Another cleaned down then the black and red paint were ready to spray on. I am no expert on spray painting but l was advised to do dust coats instead of laying layers of paint in top of each other. Taking the advise was wise. In between the 2 coat a wet and dry sanding with 2000 grit sanding paper was needed for a better finish. Once the finish layer had dried a protective layer of lacquer was applied. Two thin layers did the job.

One thing l was quite embarrassed about and didn’t take picture was messing up the entire final finish because l didn’t let it dry completely. The top piece where the keyboard sits was ruined completely. I had to scrape all the paint down to the bare aluminium, cleaning in between the keys and then re-sparying it again. It was the most frustrating part ever, worse than cracking the screen!

On the third day after everything had dried, it was ready to assemble. This came with its problems as well. Firstly, once everything had been set in place, it wouldn’t turn on. After an hour of searching the problem, it turned out l forgot to close a small latch that connects the keyboard cable to the main board! Secondly, the screen came on but nothing would boot up. Again, another 2 hours of searching for a fix, it turned out, l messed up the cable for the primary drive. So now my Macbook is running on one HDD until the ribbon for the second HDD arrives. And thirdly, the backlight for the keyboard l wanted red, so l did the process correctly and added the transparent red film inside the keyboard.

Am l glad l did it? Yes indeed because it is personal to me and how l wanted it to look.

Would l do this again? Oh yes!