Good point about silicone ‘bleeding’ oil. This indeed cause problems with many 
conductive rubber things like key contacts, keypads, etc. External 
contamination can have the same effect. These can be rejuvenated by soaking in 
a mild alkaline solution such as household ammonia or sodium hydroxide (about 1 
teaspoon per liter of water). 

Depending on the level of contamination it could take 6-48 hours of soaking. I 
typically rinse well and then soak in 98% denatured alcohol to dry it out. This 
works very well on key contacts, and keypads but I have not tried it on zebra 
strips. 

There is no fix for the loss of elasticity though.

 

Jeff Birt

 

From: M100 <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Peter Noeth
Sent: Wednesday, July 7, 2021 4:28 PM
To: Model 100 Discussion <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [M100] New zebra strips for M100 display ? any interest?

 

My experience with zebra strips, in general are threefold:

1.      The silicon can "outgas" its oils over time, if they were not baked 
correctly at manufacture. This oil can contaminate the carbon layers on the 
"face ends" where the strip contacts the glass / PCB, causing open connections. 
2.      The face ends of the carbon layers are not always friendly to cleaning. 
The conductivity of the carbon layers can be lost, especially after 5 years.
3.      The silicon can lose its elasticity, causing open connections. This 
mostly manifests itself during reassembly of an LCD display module if reusing 
the original zebra strips. Especially after 40 years of questionable storage 
conditions.

When disassembly of an LCD display module was necessary, new zebra strips were 
always used during reassembly. This just removes a lot of potential problems, 
especially if you warrant your work.

 

So having a source for replacement zebra strips for the notebook computers 
would be handy, but at a minimum production quantity of 1000, you would 
probably still have 800 when you die. Maybe not economical, from a business 
investment, but maybe from a passion standpoint.

 

I would buy a dozen :-)

 

Regards,

 

Peter

 

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2021 19:33:53 -0400
From: Jamie Nichol <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> >
To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> 
Subject: [M100] New zebra strips for M100 display
        =?utf-8?Q?=E2=80=94_?=any interest?
Message-ID: <d6b92cdc-63e0-40d1-8b37-fa40b8641a9b@Spark>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Hey All,

I do consumer product R&D as my day job.??I?ve admired the M100 as a brilliant 
product for the past decade or so, and just picked up a really sad example that 
I?m trying to resuscitate.

A couple of weeks ago I had a some fine-pitch prototype zebra strips made up to 
fit the M100 LCD (see pic).??The first prototypes are about 0.3mm too 
tall.??I?ll likely have another set of prototypes run with an adjusted height.

I have two questions:

Is there enough interest here on the list to justify an order of 1000 pieces or 
so???(Likely price is a few dollars each strip ? more to come on price.)

Do any of you have dead LCDs that you would be wiling to sacrifice to the 
testing gods???I would like to see ten or so LCDs improved by an upgrade to the 
new strips before placing a bigger order.

?Jamie


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