Unhinged: how one of my hinges broke and how I "repaired" it

josch · April 26, 2025, 3:15pm

Two weeks ago the right hinge of my classic Reform broke. The symptom looks like this: https://mister-muffin.de/p/2Ng8.webm

I bought my Reform in 2021 and I’m taking it to work and back and on trips etc, so it gets opened and closed multiple times per day. I guess I can live with the thing breaking after having been exercised a few thousand times. Somehow the pins that hold the two metal parts you can see below together snapped:

I’m traveling to MiniDebConf Hamburg next week and since the hinge itself is broken and needs replacement anyways, I attempted a desperate fix: The tiny bolts that broke are quite a bit “softer” than the steel that the remainder of the hinge is made of. So it was possible to drill into the bolts, effectively removing them from both parts and widening the hole a bit until it was 2mm in diameter. And at that point, 2 M2 screws were able to do the same job that the metal bolts did before:

Lets see how long this survives.

josch · April 26, 2025, 6:27pm

Unsolicited follow-up: I didn’t have any M2 nuts at home and no shop in my town sells nuts this tiny. But I still had a stack of press-fit threaded M2 inserts for using with 3D printed PLA:

By shortening them a bit, these were able to fulfill the job a M2 nut would otherwise do:

I definitely have to stock up on more M2 compatible material for future hardware abuses.

josch · August 6, 2025, 5:07pm

Last week, so 3 months after my right hinge broke, my left hinge broke in the exact same way. In the meantime I received replacement hinges from MNT but instead of throwing away the old hinge I decided to repair it in a similar way to keep it a bit longer and use the new hinges as the final backup. Since this is the second time, I also took more photos to document this.

From the angle of the hinge compared to the case and the screen you can see that the just as it happened for the right hinge, the two pins or rivets on the inside broke off:

Here is a close-up showing how they sheared cleanly off:

So just as I did with my right-hand-side hinge I drilled out the two pins that still stuck in the holes on both sides and then enlarged the holes a tiny but to a diameter of 2 mm:

Since I had learned from last time I now had a few M2 screws and nuts at home to try out and fix the thing more properly and without having to resort to using some press-fit inserts. I first tried with 5 mm DIN/ISO 7380-2 screws because I thought that the whole assembly should be as flat as possible (and it looked nicer):

On the back, the screws are held by M2 nuts:

But when trying to fit the hinge into the case it turned out I was wrong. There is actually plenty space upwards but no space to the side and the head of the DIN 7380 screws would collide with the back of the case.

So instead, I ended up using 5 mm M2 screws with a cylinder head (DIN 912). The head is taller but that is fine as there is sufficient space above the hinge.

The diameter of the DIN 912 cylinder head is flush with the back of the case:

In case you are situated in Germany and this happens to you, I got my M2 screws from here. Specifically I got:

I can recommend that shop. They ship very fast. I paid via SEPA transfer at around 13:30 one day and the package was in my post box the day after.

Next time I order with them I should probably also get a bag of M2 torx screws as the philips heads of the screws in my Reform start showing their age and I already had to dremel some of them out as their head is completely busted from having been used too often…

Hope this helps!