One of the other early Framework 11 users was kind enough to do the soldering on my Framework 11 after I messed up. It works now, albeit with this kludge of a repair. Personally and professionally, Framework missed a chance to live up to their mission statement of being the most attentive to customers in the laptop business. They could have used liability insurance to pay for doing the rework, either at their facility or by outsourcing it to whomever. Their good is coming up with this fix. Their bad is leaving it to us early followers who loved the concept, loved the laptop and were bitterly disappointed to find it flawed and have been left swinging in the breeze. FWIW, Framework should not be too complacent about their decision to dump the board work onto end users. Liability law in California is worth looking at if you want to know more. As for myself. I got lucky.
Is there some kind of a USB-C / Thunderbolt connection stability issues even with the 13th gen and AMD boards? I was hoping all power related issues would have been addressed by now (e.g. sleep / suspend, resume. For example, if I’m running a VM from a Thunderbolt drive via a TB dock, then suspend and resume the laptop, it shouldn’t kill my running VM)
I just finished the RTC circuit replacement on the two 11th Gen FW13s in our household. All in all, it went pretty smoothly - the second (my partner’s batch 1) took maybe 10 minutes total (from disassembly to replacement/solder to reassembly). The circuit is a tight fit into the coin cell socket, though - I cracked the socket on the first one (my machine) but I rigged up a fix. The second attempt went perfect, probably because I was more careful.
To solder, I put the solder on the tip (I used a generic “small” chisel tip), held the wire over the circuit with tweezers, and then just tapped the tip to the wire/circuit and lifted away, and repeated until the wire stuck. It only took two or three tries, and turned out pretty decent.
It is so nice to be able, after reassembly and before connecting power, to press the power button and have it finally turn on without first connecting it to power regardless of the battery status.
We also have a pair of 11 gen machines in our household that’ll have to go through this; not imminent, but in the foreseeable future, partly due to expected changes in usage patterns (not always feasible to keep plugged in).
This seems to have taken out quite a few cell holders, as reported on this thread. Any thoughts on ever so slightly reducing relevant dimension(s) of the circuit to mitigate this in new kits? @nrp
I’ve seen mentions of sanding down the lip of the component, it was upthread here I think.
I recall Framework sending back this fake battery for rework as it was a bit too large for the holder. Perhaps the last go around they stopped tinkering with it
@Gary_S it would not have been an hour to solder the thing in if i had not broke the damm Battery holder. I really don´t like the handling of the situation.
Well, the 2 capacitors went “poof” on the second attempt to solder, so soldered to the underlying voltage regulator. It all works for now. As for how they handled this, as I have said before. Half full for coming up with a fix for their design flaw. The glass half empty for dumping the fix onto us early enthusiasts instead of using liability insurance to get it done in-house or pay for a repair shop.
I handled the holder oh so carefully. I recall it took me many minutes to gingerly work the fake battery into place, unlike taking out the original battery in seconds.
@Ian_Thomas The socket is definitely the weak part of this operation. I also spent a significant amount of time on my FW13 (the first one I did the rework on) working something up after cracking mine. Thankfully the second one went much smoother, either due to increased diligence, familiarity, or even just variation in the parts.
If something could be done to reduce the diameter of the replacement just a bit it would go a lot smoother for folks, I think.
Yes, the socket is a weak element and the fake battery a bit too big, but at this point I doubt that Framework will send it back for adjustment. Ah well.
The PCB dimensions are sized to make sure that the board makes good contact to the contacts, while still being possible to insert without breaking the receptacle. It can be neither larger nor smaller while satisfying those requirements. We tuned this carefully after several rounds of iteration. The reason an actual coin cell is easier to insert and remove is because coin cells have a rounded shape in 3 dimensions. A round PCB is just a cylinder. As folks have noted throughout this thread (and we emphasize in the Guide), you can insert the PCB without breaking the socket if you do so carefully, and you can also easily break the socket if you do not insert the PCB carefully.
Again, please keep this topic on-track for rework instructions, experience, etc.
If you want to talk about “the issue” there are other threads to go find.
I did the rework on my two 11th gen Intel Frameworks. I’m two for two broken battery holders. I was incredibly careful trying to install the modules. It felt like the modules couldn’t fully get under even one side of the holder due to their thickness. I ended up doing this on both laptops:
Removed the broken battery holder plastic. Desoldered the lower battery contact. Covered the PCB with electrical tape to protect the traces. Soldered a short wire to the underside of the module. Soldered the other end of the wire to the lower contact solder point. The insulation of the wire protects it from touching the outer ring of the module, this preventing a short. Finally I soldered the outer ring of the module to the top battery contact. Finally I covered the module with a layer of electrical tape.
Hello, I have run into some issues and I want a sanity check before I give up hope.
I have broken off the battery holster and solder pad in a similar manner to Tom1. I tried to repair it by soldering directly to the trace. Then, I ripped off the entire trace, so it is a worse situation than him.
I use my mainboard as a server, so it will never go more than 1-2 hours without power (unless disaster strikes). However, there are some non-negotiable BIOS settings that must be set, so if the BIOS is reset with every unplug, then this is unusable for me. I use a strange software stack that requires a physical unplug of the motherboard rather than rebooting from the operating system.
I attempted the RTC repair so that I could use the main battery as a UPS, but I am willing to live without such a UPS if I can save my BIOS settings.
Which trace? Pictures? Is the trace fully ripped off or still attached on the end?
You or someone else could follow the trace and find another point to connect a wire. But it might be a much smaller point than the original pad. So you might need practice before attempting it.
The socket is definitely the weak part of this operation. I also spent a significant amount of time on my FW13 (the first one I did the rework on) working something up after cracking mine. Thankfully the second one went much smoother, either due to increased diligence, familiarity, or even just variation in the parts.
