I’ve got in my hands a Panasonic Toughbook CF-51 and I didn’t went to work because of thanks giving day, so I was there waiting with this laptop and a little spare time, so to kill some time I’ve decided to disassemble the laptop and put it back together.

This are not instructions on how to take apart your laptop, this is only my experience and what I’ve learned, so here I go.

The first thing I did, was to remove the battery, and the cd, for the battery, I had to use a small screwdriver to pop the cover. Then I removed all the bottom screws, there were 13:

To remove the keyboard first I had to pop the frontal speakers cover, I’ve inserted a screwdriver beneath the lcd base, and carefully pull the cover:

Once the speakers cover was removed I’ve carefully picked up the keyboard to found that it is attached near the touchpad, it has a little white clip, that you need to pop in order to remove the cable.

After removing the keyboard, I had to remove the screen to acces the main board, to do this there are 4 screws that support the screen, there are 2 on each side:

After you remove the 4 screws you can move the screen but It has to be unplugged from the main board, and the connectors were located under the speakers, so I have to remove 7 more screws to have access to the lcd connectors:

 

Before removing the speakers and the touchpad section I had to unplug them, the connectors are located near the keyboard connector:

Here is the top cover removed:

From this point the only tricky part was finding 2 screws that are at the bottom of the lcd base, covered with a sticker:

I continued removing parts but there wasn’t any other tricky part, here are some more pics:

4 Comments to “Taking apart a Panasonic Toughbook CF-51”

• January 5, 2010 at 2:57 pm
  Mauricio Perez says:

  thank you–very useful and a
  tremendous job documenting the
  whole process!!!
• April 9, 2011 at 10:31 am
  Adam says:

  when romoving the keyboard did you find that it had some kind of adhesive holding it to the shell? Mines did not to sure what type of adhesive it was or where to find some more. Any idea?
• November 13, 2011 at 7:09 am
  Boris says:

  Thank you very much. It is very useful but difficult to find on web! I found it with Yandex on page 5 only not with Google, Bing or Yahoo. Thanks more.
• May 2, 2012 at 7:28 am
  Kelly says:

  Very good. This would have been impossible without this. Thanks!