10. Now it's time to put everything back together. I made a cutting guide (
h2o adhesive frames.zip : make sure to print the pdf at 100%) to get all the necessary shapes of adhesive out of a single A4-sized sheet. You might get away with strips of tape of different sizes. But after trying that first, I think it is a weaker connection and may not last long. My initial goal was to make the reader water-proof again, which only works with uninterrupted tape. Rumors about additional nano particle treatment kept me from drowning my newly-repaired H2O (1st gen.). Maybe someone knows more about that ?
11. Print out the cutting guide, glue it on a sheet of A4-sized 3M 300LSE double-sided adhesive with glue stick or spray glue and cut it out with a blade or an exacto knife. I made everything a little undersized to have some wiggle-room, but that is to make it easier to put the tape correctly on the parts, you still need to cut them precisely on the line. If you don't want to ruin your sheet of adhesive on your first try, make a test run with paper. Cut everything out and see for yourself. That helped me a lot.
12. Now that you have all the adhesive ready, start by putting it on the aluminum back plate. Before pulling off the protection from the other side of the tape put your new screen on the plate to get a feel for it. Pay close attention to how you are planning to route the two ribbon cables. Both need to go to the back side of the aluminum. What works best for me to position the new screen, is to put in the two bottom corners while the rest of the screen is still at an angle. When the cables are where they belong push the rest of the screen in like a door, aiming for the two upper corners.
13. Now put the small adhesive frame on the inside of the light guide and the bigger frame on the inside of the front cover. You should have a gap of about half a millimeter around all the edges to avoid sticky tape sticking out from inside the casing later. Always verify the tape by holding it over the part to get a feel for its position before peeling of the protective paper. Then just pull off a small part of one outside corner at the bottom and stick it on. If it's a small corner you might still be able to reposition it if you have to. If you are satisfied with the one corner pull away the protective paper from the whole bottom side, cutting it if it's in your way (paper only, not the adhesive !). Now, applying tension to the tape and aiming for the other bottom corner, you can stick the tape on. Continue the same way for the left and right side and finish with the top side.
14. Put the pcb to the back of the aluminum plate, carefully threading screen-, front light- and battery cables through their openings. Hold it in place only very loosely with two screws (the pcb still needs to be able to slide a tiny bit on the aluminum for the aliment in the next step). Connect battery, front light and screen. You can turn your reader on now to check the screen, but turn it back off afterwards.
15. Pull off the protective tape from your new screen if there is any and position the light frame over it. You might have noticed that the light guide has a tiny plastic pin in each corner. They go into four corresponding holes in the pcb. If they are not in yet, push them in gently. Turn everything around and put it screen-down on a flat, forgiving surface (ex. card board on table). If the pins popped out of their holes push them back in. you can still wiggle the pcb to find the right position. You have the right position when all four pins stay in without you pushing. Now tighten the two screws on the pcb and put in the four others. Double check the pins. The screen and the pcb are aligned now.
16. Time to glue the light guide down, the most sensitive part of this operation. Just like for the screen itself, I suggest you make always a dry run first. Put the two bottom pins into their respective holes in the pcb, but keep the light guide angled away from the screen. Not so much as to break the pins, but enough as to keep the adhesive away from the screen. You can do that with just your index finger in the middle of the bottom edge of the light guide if you put the reader on the table. Then gently let the light guide down making sure the upper pins fall into place. Rub around the surface of the light guide to make the tape sick. Even without the housing you should be able switch the H2O on and the touch screen should work. The sketch pad in the beta features is a good place to check out the touch screen.
17. Almost done now, two more steps : Put your reader into its back cover and put the screws in the four corners.
18. You need to glue the front cover on the rest of the housing. It helps to create a 90 degree corner on the table by clamping down two straight pieces of wood or even just two heavy books. If you push one corner of your reader into this, it gives you a guide to put the front cover in the correct position. Once I'm done with all the sticky tape I put the reader screen-down on a flat, hard surface and weight it down over night to make the tape stick even better, but I don't know if this is strictly necessary.
19. Voilà !! Your Aura H2O has a brand new screen. But sadly I must say you should probably keep it away from water from now on. As I sad, I never checked for water-proofness.