Quote:
Originally Posted by Raptor464
This is the correct procedure to follow if your trackball click function is lost. I have performed it quite a few times on multiple berry's and have had success every time. What happens sometimes is moisture can get into the contact's housing which causes some corrosion. By prying up the tape slightly exposing the contact, you can clean the corrosion with a small blade. What I have had the most trouble with is with the resetting of the contact into the housing. It can take multiple tries to get the contact to sit it the perfect position so that the edges make contact with the side contacts and the center of the button is able to touch the center contact upon depression. Be very careful when cleaning the contact itself with alcohol because if you do not allow enough time for the alcohol to dry, your contact will again become corroded and not function correctly. I would love to post a step by step instruction on this procedure but I do not have a high resolution camera to take pictures.
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Recently, my clicking trackball stopped working on my BlackBerry Bold, and it's out of warranty. I decided to open it up, and actually did the following:
I used a weakly magnetized jeweler's screwdriver (swipe fridge magnet to magnetize it a little), to help me move parts around such as the spoon (bowl). This is a clicker just like a keyboard button, but this clicker is special: On the BlackBerry Bold, the trackball clicker is a removable piece of circular metal that's not soldered down! Which means it's possible to self-repair this clicker. As preparation, pour some rubbing alcohol (isopropyl) into its bottlecap, very lightly dip Q-tips very partially into the bottlecap, wait for the Q-tip to mostly dry out (stay slightly damp with rubbing alcohol), and use that as my cleaning tools. Have extra dry Q-Tips as well, for cleaning and drying.
1. After removing trackball, clean all the dirt and dust you see. Blast with canned air (carefully).
2. Clean insides of the trackball depression area with one dry Q-tip followed immediately by one very slightly-isopropyl-dampened Q-Tip immediately followed by a third, dry Q-tip.
3. The metal clicker ("spoon" or "bowl") is a removable unit under the orange--copper tape. No conductor is attached to it. Peel it carefully off the tape using the tip of a jeweler's screwdriver. Can also instead use tip of a thumbtack or the tip of am exacto knife, or such. It's just a square piece of clear orange/copper tape covering the metal clicker ("spoon")
4. Rub that tiny spoon/bowl between two of the previously-dampened Q-tips, over a clean sheet of paper or clean surface.
5. Rub the revealed inside contact on BlackBerry with previously-dampened Q-tip, immediately by drying with a dry Q-tip.
6. Use the weakly magnetized jeweler's screwdriver to drop the metal bowl (spoon) back into the square-shaped holder (er, diamond-shaped, as it is rotated 45 degrees on a Bold). It's easier to use a weakly magnetized rod to move the tiny bowl around, than to use needle-nose pliers.
7. Put the tape back on. carefully, using the tip of the jeweler's screwdriver to manipulate the piece of tape back into location, before pressing it down. Be careful that the clicker (spoon) does not stick or shift around.
Working replacements for the copper/orange tape, if it is ruined or dirtied when you remove it off the metal clicker circle (spoon/bowl)
- Use a low-tack tape solution. Real tape is too sticky, keeps it from clicking too well, and hard to maintain in the future next time it fails. So I used 3M low-tack tape (post-it-note stickiness), which is available as the 3M blue-roll of scotch-like tape (It was also a popular screen protector for the Palm Grafitti area in year 1997 through 1999)
- You can even cut out a tiny square piece of Post-It Note, and use it instead of the orange/copper tape. It works great, until it gets wet for extended periods. To water-proof it, you can put clear packing tape on the top of the Post-It note to 'laminate' it, before you cut out a tiny square piece (with the low-tack stickiness facing downwards).
- If you have access to an electronics supply store, Kapton tape works as well if it is not too sticky, but most Kapton tape is more sticky than the existing copper/orange square piece of tape.
Both of the above solutions works great as a quick fix, if you're already used to disassembling your BlackBerry.