In the past few months my Blackberry has started misbehaving. The clickwheel has become erratic, mostly scrolling down: sometimes it will scroll down, and sometimes it won’t. Also, it wouldn’t “click”. So I decided to opt for surgery.

First job: get rid of the retaining ring. Just pry it off gently from the left, right, and bottom sides.

blackberry clickwheel extraction

Then pop out the clickwheel assembly. This can pop out (it is held in place by a small magnet) or you can gently lift it off with a small screwdriver.

The contact at the bottom looked awful. A cotton swab (that’s “q-tip” for the rest of us), some alcohol and a can of compressed air is all that’s needed to clean all around. Dab, don’t smear. Also clean the little wheels on the clickwheel assembly.

Pop things back together…and…wait? did you not keep track of the orientation? Not a big deal. The contact at the bottom of the clickwheel assembly can point up or down.

blackberry clickwheel extraction

The verdict? Not sure how well it works yet. I’ll have to give it another day or so to make sure. It scrolls better now, and I am able to click again, though perhaps the clicking is too sensitive.

Here are some more annotated pictures of the process.

Mickey

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Techy Stuff, Total Mobility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.