Tearing down an Amazon Fire tablet retired due to a broken screen, I removed everything I can from the back hoping to find something that would help me release the front. This was unlikely but I held out hope.... hope that has now been dashed. There are no secret back door entrances, I have to fight the double-sided adhesive strips protecting the front door. For me, this is the least enjoyable part of electronics teardowns. There's no clever puzzle-solving in tearing glued pieces apart, it's just brute force messy nastiness.

I have not yet developed the knack to do this gently. If the touch digitizer glass wasn't cracked before, I'm sure it would have cracked after I tried to pry it free. Thankfully it was already cracked, so this was merely even more cracked. And I'm thankful for the clear packing tape I applied earlier, they were able to hold most of the pieces together. If you are planning to tackle this task and wanted to see how much glue you'll need to fight, this pictures should help.

What was my reward for all this work? The intact display screen module underneath the (now extremely cracked) touch digitizer glass. I had feared it was held by its own adhesives, but the Amazon engineers apparently decided the adhesive on touch digitizer is enough to keep both of these components in place. The screen was held by only a few thin strips of tape, and here I am thankful I removed the battery earlier as it allowed me to push from the back and pop it free.

There was a side bonus here: the tablet chassis held two small magnets. Probably for a tablet screen cover accessory, but now I want to free them. The good news is that I don't care about preserving the tablet chassis, the bad news is that magnets are brittle and can break under stress. I misjudged how thick they were and broke one. But now I knew they were thin and only held by a strip of double-sided tape, I was able to use a thin blade and cut the other free while keeping it intact.

Once the magnets were recovered, there was nothing else I wanted from this tablet chassis frame and it will head towards landfill while I examine my prize: the LCD module.