Having taken what amounted to a day off from my December Adventure for Christmas, day 26 saw me return to my original list of ideas as I took the time to reinforce the hinges on my Psion Series 3a. As I noted previously, this was on hold as I worked out how to record and document the process to help others looking to do it themselves. Armed with my new desk tripod, I gave it a shot.

I also took some time to finish moving both StatusPanel and Anytime from Caddy to a combination of nginx and certbot. I’ll not go into more detail here, but I’m happy to be back on more mainstream infrastructure, and hopeful it will reduce maintenance costs in the future.

Hinge Reinforcement

Anyone who’s searched for a Psion on eBay will know that the hinges are their Achilles' heel—with the exception of the (hingeless) Organisers, if the hinges haven’t cracked yet, it’s only a matter of time. To address this, members of the Psion community have taken to using JB Weld to reinforce hinges, and even restore broken ones. This works incredibly well and, since my wood-grain Series 3a was in need of this treatment, I thought it would be a good idea to document it.

Disassembly

Thankfully, with the Series 3 range of devices, you can get access the hinges without opening the device—this means you can avoid subjecting them to one last open that might crack the hinges:

  1. Remove the battery cover.
  2. Unscrew the four screws holding the spine in place.
  3. Gently ease the spine off the device, taking care not to damage the battery cable on the right-hand side.
  4. Using some tweezers, side the cable out of the cable guide, and unplug the JST connector, and fully remove the spine.

Application

The process I’ve settled on for my Psions is to just reinforce the screen-side of the hinges—these are easy to access and most prone to cracking. The goal is to fill the recess on the back of each hinge and fillet or taper the JB Weld down to the curve of the hinges themselves, taking care not to get any epoxy onto the other half of the hinges. This is a delicate operation, so go slow, and use a small palette knife like implement: I started with a cut-off Q-tip which proved too large, and ultimately settled on some rounded tweezers.

Complete

If everything’s gone well you’ll have a small fillet of JB Weld on the back of each hinge. After 24 hours, you can replace the spine, batteries, and battery cover and your Psion should be ready for another 20 years of daily use. 🤞

I’m looking forward to getting back to using my Series 3a once the JB Weld has cured—I’ve still never tried a Series 3 or 3a with Reconnect, and I’m looking forward to breaking out the 3Link and doing so.