The hinges in my venerable nc4000 finally gave way a few weeks ago - specifically, the small die-cast pieces that connected the stiff hinge axis to the base simply shattered into a couple of annoying fragments. This meant that the laptop lid simply hung free, so I had to prop it up against a backing (wall, stack of books, iron, Stonehenge, whatever) to use it. This situation quickly became absurd, so I went to see my dad, who is an expert with fixing all things electrical.

My first suggestion was to glue the broken parts together. As I discovered, contrary to popular belief, two-part epoxy doesn't fix everything. So, what to do? Well, we made replacement parts. This involved finding an L-shaped piece of aluminum, a bandsaw, a file, a drill and of course, a dremel. They were quite fiddly to make (see pictures to the left), but the case only needed minor modifications so that the parts could fit. They are back in place now, and the laptop is ticking away quite happily without any need for any dodgy backboard. If you'd like more details on how it was done, just leave a comment or send me an email :)

In other news, some people seemed to like the quake paper models ;) In particular, see here for a particularly good example of how to get the model built right. I got a great big spike in traffic when the models hit the front page on planetquake. Also: alientrap and thetangentbundle. I'm really glad people are enjoying the models.