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Friday, June 29, 2007

Clean Mighty Mouse's Scroll Ball

I love mighty mouse for the fact that it's simplistically beautiful and highly functional. But i guess there's no such thing as perfect. The drawback of mighty mouse is the scroll ball traps dirt and grease easily and after sometime it doesn't work at all when you scroll downward. I was trying to clean the dirt and stuff that was trapped inside the mouse by following official instruction from Apple but it didn't work at all. I've googled and found out that many people have the same problem. Some said the official instruction worked, some took a step further by applying alcohol to the ball, and other went to the extreme by disassembling it. Well, I've tried them all except the last option. I left it unused for months now and thought well I don't do anything about it I won't be able to use it anyways so I rather get it fixed or chuck it in the bin. I was in dilemma because if I was to take it apart then it had to break it because it has a ring that keep top part and second part of the mouse together and Apple attaches the ring to the mouse by gluing. If it used clips or things like that I would have done it ages ago. Yeah, finally it disassembled it and found out there were big chunks of dirt and lint on the wheels driven by the scroll ball and I was amazed by the simplicity of the design and yet it works like magic. But i had to glued them back together and it is the worst thing :( Ok, I have a question. Why don't they use clips (I wouldn't want screws though) instead of glue? Or do they encourage us to buy a new one every now and then?

The top part, the bottom part and the ring

The scroll ball compartment (there are 4 other wheels in it)

The wheels attached the compartment

The wheels driven by the scroll ball

Put them back after cleaning

It works now :)

2 comments:

manie.com said...

Good job!!!

Anonymous said...

hope u r the best mouse researcher haha