Hi Folks - I said I'd put a tutorial up on how to change the screen out in one of my M5's. Turns out I didn't take nearly enough pictures to do an effective tutorial, but more like a "here it is, and watch for this" message.
In January, I essentially destroyed the front of my Gold M5, rendering it useless.
Needless to say, I was bummed. After much pleading and shipping charges, I was able to get Shanling to ship me the parts I needed. Namely, a new screen.
The M5 is well built, solid aluminum for the frame, but certainly not unbendable as shown above. During the rebuilt, a little hammer and a shield for the aluminum, and it was straight again.
The main part of the post.
Remove this ridiculously tiny allen screw.
BEFORE you perform the next step, use some tape to hold the power button in place or it will most certainly fly across room with the non-carpeted floor, with so many sound reflections, you will never, ever find it again.
Then using a "tool" I've never thought of as a tool until today's electronics - a suction cup to gently pull the carbon-fiber-looking back off of the unit.
Now that the unit is open, there's still quite a lot to do. There are several screws that must be removed before you can get to the damaged screen, which BTW, loads from the front. (These screws have already been removed in this pic)
Nice Design
After gracefully unplugging the bad screen, and getting the board out, it was literally brute-force to get the damaged screen thanks to some very sturdy industrial glue.
The next pics are of more info and gotchas.
See the nylon ring? As one would surmise, that goes into the hole in the casing for the navigation wheel (which is in 4 parts, that can only go back together one way, but watch the silkscreened nav part). If you forget this nylon ring pictured, you get a rather nasty metal-on-metal scraping when rotating the nav-wheel
After you lay in the screen from the front, you'll need to secure it temporarily as reassembly is all from the back. I used scotch-tape.
Couple pics on the ribbon connector for the screen. Though they're not great pics, and from different angles, there is a lever which must be snapped in place once the ribbon connector-edge is inserted into the base-connector.
Open:
Closed
Reassemble.
Back again.
Note that I broke M5 in January. Here is it, into March, and finally getting it fixed.
After about a month w/o my M5, I bought another, so I could stop missing the music. At the time, I didn't have a lot of confidence that I'd be able to fix my gold one.
Funny as it may be, I actually did fix the gold one.
It's the one I'm going to keep, and I'm going to sell the new black one here.
Thanks for reading.