Why not just use the security torx driver you would remove the 2 antennas with the motherboard. No soldering!

It appears there are curved metal tabs (1 on each side of the connector) that compress until they lock the connector in place or the connector is removed, but doing so evenly as to not break off the 2 gold knife blades on the logic board that slide into the plastic connector. Both the tabs & gold knife connectors are seen in the 2nd picture, in the first picture you can see how the tabs look when they are locked into the logic board connection.

Wish a view of the back of the fan was included to determine what fan specs are needed for replacement. ifixit doesn’t have the part.

I removed the OLD ODD/DVD Drive and put an Laptop HDD 1gb from an old MacBook that met with a tragic death. It jumped off our 4th floor balcony. The HDD survived, but not any other part. But that 750GB Laptop Drive was put in the place of the ODD with a ODD to HDD conversion part. (I figured that the last time I had put a disk in the ODD had been over a year ago) the other 2 SATA ports were occupied by 2 SSD’s each 240GB So I Could have VM’s on one HDD and segmented from the primary OS and the Media (documents, Pictures, videos on the HDD) The first time I booted it I though for sure I had some failure. Rather than the normal crawl across the screen of the progress bar it zipped across in under 3 seconds. One of the best upgrades I could ever do. (besides replacing fans that are starting to be loud (their warning they are starting to fail)

I had the kit as well and also had a spare sata data cable that terminating with a L connector and was about 2” longer. Made routing the cable substantially easier.

I am going to put a very important comment here. Before you start this process listen to the fans on your iMac do any of them sound obviously loud (think about how quiet your iMac used to sound as a reference) If you notice one or more of them sounding substantially loud compared to the others consider locating a replacement fan prior starting this process. After all if you are already “in the neighborhood” it is a shame to do all this work only to have to disassemble your imac a couple weeks later because you realize the fan is failing. I speak from my own personal learning experience of having to disassembly my iMac 3 weeks later because the HDD was failing and apparently the moving the fan around was just enough to push it to start really under performing.

That's what I ran into with my friends iMac as well. it was just (very carefully slid into place. a piece of celotape held it in as we put the pieces together.

Would have been helpful to box the same red area when using the plastic card to separate the glue. Since the red blocked picture is inverted, if someone doesn't pay close attention it may not be obvious that the area of concern is at the right top of the graphic pictures in which the plastic card use is being demonstrated..

This can be done, but can be problematic if it is not cleaned thoroughly (not just in part you can see but the cyclone chamber that is above the little holes in the graphics) the dust will turn into clay pieces which sound like rocks during operation. If not allowed to fully dry BEFORE reassembly (48 hours) the cyclone chamber will mildew resulting in a bad smell coming from the vac exhaust during operation (possibly damaging the rubber seals as a result) and since the chamber is above the little holes you can see it's difficult to resolve once it's occurred.

graphic is not for the proper model iMac. For this series iMac there is only 1 pair (2 total) of memory slots, this graphic displays 2 pairs (4 total). Also there is a lever to eject the ram not plastic tabs.