If you want to refurbish screens, OCA is 100x better than LOCA. In terms of big machinery, you will need;
- OCA applier (rolls OCA on the LCD)
- Laminator (presses glass to LCD)
- Autoclave (removes bubbles)
- Cleanroom bench (minimise dust)
- Hot plate (evenly heat screens when splitting)
- (Optional) bezel fitting machine (can do this by hand, but the machines usually work really well, give it a nice fit)
- (Optional) splitting machine (not really needed if you do it by hand)
- Phones/tester machines (for testing completed screens. Preferably use phones which are more accurate, and get the screen extension pieces, so you are not plugging directly into phone and the connectors last longer)
You can get the laminator and autoclave as one machine, to save on costs.
Consumables;
- Glass (get original if possible, so you get iPhone glass with the oleophobic coating, and with the curve on the edge of the glass for iPhone 6 onwards)
- Bezels (for iPhone, get original with clear heat activated glue. Ones with 3m tape will definitely not hold the glass long enough. Get clear glue, other stuff is old and glass will lift over time)
- Backlights (no matter how good you are, you will get cleaner leak into this every now and then)
- Glue Cleaner (TIM cleaner is good stuff)
- OCA (get stuff with the peelable edge and packaging like this, other stuff will not be as good. Store in a not too hot area https://www.aliexpress.com/item/50pcs-25...)
- Thin wire (can get thin wire with handles from China. This usually snaps after a while)
- Phone test extension pieces (connectors wear out over time)
- Molds (for lining glass to LCD, will need for all models and you may need to replace over time)
- Earpiece meshes (if selling/refurbishing for others)
Probably forgotten something (don't do this anymore), but hope this helps :)
It will be a learning process, and even though you have all this stuff, it will not work 100% till you get the adjustments right and tune the process.
Personal preference, don't refurbish copy screens. Usually there will be no issues, but copy screens have a higher rate of coming back than original screens. Not worth the hassle IMO, remember you are giving broken screens a new life (which have been knocked, dropped and god knows what else), so the screens have been through a lot :D
If you are refurbishing screens for repairs, go for it if you have a high volume. If you are looking to refurbish screens for repair shops or to sell (on eBay for example), think hard before you spend all that money. The market is extremely competitive, it will take a while to make back your money since more companies are doing this now and screen prices are not as high as they were a year ago. It can also be time consuming getting the process sorted (buying screens, refurbishing, testing selling screens, etc) and with this iPhone business, you typically have to deal with a higher volume of customers than a higher value repair market, to get a decent profit (so you will need at least you and 1/2 others to run this well).
Just my 2 cents, hope this helps. Once you get an assembly line of good workers running, it will be good. Refurbishing Sony Xperia screens is a good market not a lot of people get into (can buy the screens for less because of this), might be worth looking into these too :)