TIP IF YOU CAN'T PULL THE CONTENTS OUT!

It's incredibly hard to work on an iPod whose battery has already started swelling and pushing against the screen. Step 5 of pulling the internals out may feel simply impossible. When the package is too tight, you have to grab the "bridge" that holds the lock switch, but when it's just too tight, the bridge snaps from one end. While that doesn't break the iPod, it leaves you with nothing to pull from!

I realized that the core problem with this stage is that in order to free up the internals, you have to squeeze the housing from the sides very hard in order to make it deform and loosen its grip ever so slightly. But as you use so much force to bend a small piece of aluminium, it's going to be very hard to simultaneously get a hold of the internals and pull them out. I placed the iPod into a small metal-bodied jewelry vise to give it just enough squeeze from the sides, and that allowed me to very easily pull out the internals! No damage on the housing.

My hold switch cable snapped too, it’s so %#*@ tiny. I don’t know if it matters that I left the hold switch to off position before I started, but now that it’s snapped, after the battery change the iPod has come alive and the buttons work despite of the snapped hold switch. Now it just can’t be locked, but that’s okay.

With the click wheel, I’m afraid you’ll have to hunt down a new one. That part might just be available somewhere.

1. Yes.

2. That’s entirely up to you. I’ve found that a cheap supermarket iron can do more damage than good because you don’t know how hot it is and the quality is bad. I rarely solder, but I’ve been happy with Hakko FX-888D. You need to practice soldering on something else first, you need to learn the basic soldering techniques (no, you don’t melt the solder as if it were candle wax!), and you will need to learn how to take care of and store the soldering iron correctly when it’s not in use. Leaded solder is far easier to work with than lead-free solder. Besides the tool itself, you’d ideally have flux in some form, some means of removing solder, and the appropriate stuff for cleaning and refreshing the tip. Any neglect will lead to frustration and the solder just not behaving as you’d expect. I also found an ammonium chloride block to help a lot when solder doesn’t stick to the tip.

3. We’re all in the same boat. Read all the comments for the extra remarks that people following this guide have made.

MY METHOD:

I used a friend at this point. I heated up one pad, and she would lift it up with tweezers so the cable wouldn’t reattach. Did it like this one by one in a row. No spudgers were used, I don’t think it’s necessary and it might even increase the risk of damaging the pad or shorting them.

I initially thought that I’d use soldering braid to collect away the melted stuff, but there’s so little of it or my braid wasn’t the right size, I just couldn’t get it to do anything.

I used the cheapest Hakko soldering station, which has a digital display for controlling the temperature precisely. Default tip. At first I didn’t get it to melt, but I increased the temperature carefully only until it did. I started with 300°C which has worked fine with leaded solder, but I had to increase it until 480°C to get this to melt. Let the soldering iron tip touch the pad slightly horizontally rather than vertically, so it gets more contact area. Use flux pen or similar when resoldering.

Addition: I felt that I needed a pair of extra hands for desoldering the battery, and attaching the new one. I wouldn’t have had enough hands on my own to carefully peel the ribbon cable away while melting the solder, and to keep it in the right angle when soldering the new one. The actual circuit board was gently held stationery by a small and cheap jewelry vise, the kind that’s designed to hold things such as small round rocks, and the touching parts are covered in plastic instead of raw metal touching the object.

Before soldering the new one, I applied flux pen on both sides of the ribbon connector because I was skeptical of whether the solder would genuinely just fall through the hole and between the ribbon and the circuit board itself. This seemed to work. I used leaded solder because lead-free solder has a higher melting point so unless you’re very experienced, it has a higher tendency to make cold joints that look good but aren’t actually good inside. Too much heat for too long can also damage parts.

Comment 2/2, the issues:

Now that the battery has been soldered, the problem is putting it back together. With most iFixit guides, you can just retrace your steps in the reverse order. But this is more complicated than that. It’s hard to remember how exactly you removed tapes and adhesives, and from where. The battery with its soldered on ribbon cable laid out is a bit too long to fit into the case, so I think something must’ve been folded up, but how? Something in the battery “root” was taped and folded up really tight, but I can’t imagine how it was. Youtube videos don’t help either, because some have batteries that connect to a different place with two places to solder, while others only show a teardown without reassembly. If we need to use adhesives, where should they be applied, and what kind of adhesive would be appropriate so it doesn’t damage the battery bag surface? And optional: what adhesive would be ideal at the top+btm, should we want to retain the ability to change batteries in the future too?

Excellent but a bit unfinished guide. I'll tell my experience in this comment and put questions in another due to the char limit.

The story so far:

The battery wasn’t fully swollen but occasionally I had noticed a small black area appear to the screen, meaning that it’s now or never if I want to save it. Before starting, I had set the key lock button to off position just in case. It took me literally days to get the contents out from the iPod, but I kept trying. The most frustrating thing ever. In the middle of this I taped the lock ribbon onto something in order to keep it out of the way, but forgot to free it up, and it snapped. I have now successfully soldered a new battery onto it (got it from a shop that specializes in batteries, try searching with P11G73-01-S01; Do use a flux pen!) Without putting the cover back on, I connected the clickwheel and display cables, and put the iPod on charger. Turns out that it comes to life normally, and the clickwheel works! No more key lock but I can live with that.