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Taking apart a Panasonic Toughbook CF-51

I’ve got in my hands a Panasonic Toughbook CF-51 and I didn’t went to work because of thanks giving day, so I was there waiting with this laptop and a little spare time, so to kill some time I’ve decided to disassemble the laptop and put it back together.

CF-51 Laptop

This are not instructions on how to take apart your laptop, this is only my experience and what I’ve learned, so here I go.

The first thing I did, was to remove the battery, and the cd, for the battery, I had to use a small screwdriver to pop the cover. Then I removed all the bottom screws, there were 13:

13 screws in the bottom

To remove the keyboard first I had to pop the frontal speakers cover, I’ve inserted a screwdriver beneath the lcd base, and carefully pull the cover:

Removing speakers cover

Speakers cover removed

Once the speakers cover was removed I’ve carefully picked up the keyboard to found that it is attached near the touchpad, it has a little white clip, that you need to pop in order to remove the cable.

Keyboard cable

Keyboard Cable ZoomIn

After removing the keyboard, I had to remove the screen to acces the main board, to do this there are 4 screws that support the screen, there are 2 on each side:

LCD base removal

After you remove the 4 screws you can move the screen but It has to be unplugged from the main board, and the connectors were located under the speakers, so I have to remove 7 more screws to have access to the lcd connectors:

Accessing the lcd Connectors 

Before removing the speakers and the touchpad section I had to unplug them, the connectors are located near the keyboard connector:

Speakers and touchpad connectors

Here is the top cover removed:

Top Cover Removed

From this point the only tricky part was finding 2 screws that are at the bottom of the lcd base, covered with a sticker:

cf51-disasemble8

I continued removing parts but there wasn’t any other tricky part, here are some more pics:

topviewnocover processorheater moboback fanremoval

  1. Mauricio Perez
    January 5th, 2010 at 14:57 | #1

    thank you–very useful and a
    tremendous job documenting the
    whole process!!!

  2. sierra
    May 19th, 2010 at 14:50 | #2

    how do i remove the battery?

  3. sierra
    May 19th, 2010 at 14:50 | #3

    i pushed the battery release thing but i don’t know where the battery is even located…

  4. May 19th, 2010 at 15:24 | #4

    I don’t remember exactly, but I think that it is at one side, but you need to first remove a screw and pop small latch.

  5. joeblow
    July 18th, 2010 at 01:03 | #5

    Thanks for this. Finally decided I couldn’t wait any longer to blow out my fans and generally clean things up some. This made it much easier and shorter task than it would otherwise have been.

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