Tearing down an Amazon Fire tablet retired due to a broken screen, I removed everything I can from the back hoping to find something that would help me release the front. This was unlikely but I held out hope…. hope that has now been dashed. There are no secret back door entrances, I have to fight the double-sided adhesive strips protecting the front door. For me, this is the least enjoyable part of electronics teardowns. There’s no clever puzzle-solving in tearing glued pieces apart, it’s just brute force messy nastiness.

I have not yet developed the knack to do this gently. If the touch digitizer glass wasn’t cracked before, I’m sure it would have cracked after I tried to pry it free. Thankfully it was already cracked, so this was merely even more cracked. And I’m thankful for the clear packing tape I applied earlier, they were able to hold most of the pieces together. If you are planning to tackle this task and wanted to see how much glue you’ll need to fight, this pictures should help.

What was my reward for all this work? The intact display screen module underneath the (now extremely cracked) touch digitizer glass. I had feared it was held by its own adhesives, but the Amazon engineers apparently decided the adhesive on touch digitizer is enough to keep both of these components in place. The screen was held by only a few thin strips of tape, and here I am thankful I removed the battery earlier as it allowed me to push from the back and pop it free.

There was a side bonus here: the tablet chassis held two small magnets. Probably for a tablet screen cover accessory, but now I want to free them. The good news is that I don’t care about preserving the tablet chassis, the bad news is that magnets are brittle and can break under stress. I misjudged how thick they were and broke one. But now I knew they were thin and only held by a strip of double-sided tape, I was able to use a thin blade and cut the other free while keeping it intact.

Once the magnets were recovered, there was nothing else I wanted from this tablet chassis frame and it will head towards landfill while I examine my prize: the LCD module.

After I moved the mainboard more-or-less out of the way, my next objective was to remove the glued-in battery. This is not just annoying, it is potentially dangerous as lithium polymer pouch batteries like these aren’t very fond of gross physical abuse. And they have a history of protesting their displeasure with a fireworks show in your face! There were two ways forward: I could leave it alone and hope it doesn’t block anything important, or I can remove it now to uncover whatever is underneath and remove a point of volatility from the project. I decided to remove it.

The battery is pretty much surrounded on all sides, but I saw Amazon engineers left a small opening as an entry point. Here it is marked after the fact.

I didn’t see an applicable tool in my iFixit repair toolkit, so I cut apart a piece of thermoformed plastic packaging for a thin and flexible spatula to dig in. I found the bottom strip of tape, and after that I was freed, I could work my way around to free the battery from the remaining three strips. That is a total of four strips of double-sided tape, one for each edge of the battery.

Thankfully the battery did not explode in my face, but I’m not entirely sure it came out unscathed, either. There were some very definitely flexing as I pulled it freed from these four tape strips, because at the time I didn’t know exactly where they all were. Perhaps with a bit of hindsight I could free the battery while putting less stress on it, but I could at least document my findings so maybe the next person who sees this can treat their battery better.

During all of this yanking and pulling of battery removal, I flexed the touch digitizer cable one too many times and it broke. Oops. Well, at least now the mainboard has been completely freed from the case.

Earlier I thought this Kapton-covered segment might have been soldered to the board and didn’t want to pull too hard. Now that I’m no longer worried about damaging this already-damaged part, I stabbed a flat tool in there to release the bond. It turns out there was no soldering, just a piece of tenacious double-sided tape.

There were a few other trivial items accessible from the back of the tablet, including the external speaker, microphones, and switches for external buttons. I was moderately curious about these items, but I had actually hoped to find something that would help me release components on the front side of the tablet. Alas, I found nothing, which meant there’s only one thing to do: start fighting glue.

I’m tearing apart an Amazon Fire tablet (SR043KL) with cracked front glass, and knowing full well this low-budget device would not have been designed to be easily serviceable. After I popped off the back shell, I quickly ran into things held by adhesives of one type or another. My first focus is to see if I can free the mainboard.

The easiest item to release is the battery connector. Two screws held a reinforcement metal plate and, once those two screws were removed, the battery connector popped free easily. On the right side of the battery, I had to peel off some tape to reveal a fairly standard connector for these ubiquitous Kapton yellow flexible circuit boards. The rear facing camera connector easily popped free, but peeling it away from double-sided tape holding it in place took more effort. On the upper-right corner was an enigma. I would eventually learn this was the cable for the touch digitizer glass panel, but after I freed the small connector nothing came loose. The large yellow square was held tight and I didn’t want to pry too hard in case it was soldered underneath to something. I left this for later.

After I removed every visible screw, the mainboard remained stubbornly in place. Poking and prodding all around, I eventually noticed these two plastic claws.

Once freed from these claws, I could flip the mainboard over, still connected by the black touch digitizer cable I had yet to remove.

From here we can see metal reinforcement for the USB port and audio jack, each held down by two screws on either side of the corresponding socket. I think the red rubbery part is a cap over the microphone, next to the front-facing camera module. Springy metal fingers make contact with parts on the chassis. From left to right they are: power button (only two out of three contacts are used), the volume up/down buttons (only three out of four contacts used) and the WiFi/Bluetooth antenna. (All three contacts used.)

I had hoped there would be something interesting to see on this side of the board, but no luck. The opposite side is mostly hidden under soldered-on metal shielding, I think I need a heat plate to remove them nicely. For the moment, components on the mainboard would have to remain a mystery. So I set it aside and started working on a stubborn battery, accidentally severing the touch digitizer cable while doing so.

Encouraged by my success salvaging an useful backlight from a cracked laptop screen, I pulled out another cracked screen from my pile of retired electronics destined for teardown. Today’s subject: an Amazon Fire tablet, model SR043KL which appears to translate to the now-obsolete 7-th generation(*) of the product line.

The primary goal of these devices are to put an Amazon shopping portal into our hands, and thus the hardware cost has been subsidized in the expectation of future sales. This was made quite explicit with the bargain “With Special Offers” edition that display more ads than the standard edition. As a side effect, there is little economic incentive to repair these devices. For example, a replacement touch digitizer glass panel(*) for this tablet costs roughly $25, which is half of the normal price for a new Fire tablet(*). Which, by the way, nobody should pay $50 for because Amazon frequently puts them on sale for less.

I got this tablet from a friend who saw no reason to try to fix something when just the parts cost is at least half the cost of a replacement. And he’s not alone. The demand for repair information is so minimal that not even our trusted resource iFixit offers much help. No teardown, no repair guide, and only a few questions on the forums. For a “better than nothing” resource I poked around to find a teardown guide for a different Fire tablet to get a rough idea of what to expect.

With memories of shattered glass fresh in my mind, my first priority was to put some clear packing tape over the screen. Reducing the likelihood of flying shards of glass if it should break apart under stresses of my prying. Given the lack of serviceability typical of devices built to low price targets, I expect a lot of prying on glued-in parts.

Using trusty tools from iFixit I started digging into the seam between the bright yellow plastic and the front face black plastic.

I would not have been surprised if the colorful backshell was glued in, but thankfully it was not. Merely held by plastic clips all around the perimeter that I could pop free.

The internal volume is dominated by the battery, which is pretty typical of tablets. The battery connector is reliably held in place by two screws that I could release to unplug the battery, but the battery itself is glued in place. Over on the right just above the battery is the screen display cable, but it is held down by tenacious tape. The rear-facing camera looked like it might easily pop out, but it is also held down by tape. The black ribbon cable in the upper right is for the touch digitizer, and it is held down by tenacious double-sided tape. And I see a speaker in the lower left, which is held by… you’ll never guess…

In summary, once we pop off the back cover, there’s little else that can be done without doing something irreversible. Almost everything else would require tearing some adhesives loose. I decided to start with the system mainboard.

(*) Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.