Wesley's Tool-Box

I've cracked the back side of an iPhone when it was made of glass, but never the front side. That changed with iPhone 6 Plus - the screen got hairline cracks when the device was dropped from about 50cm (1 1/2 feet) high onto a brick road. Getting an iPhone bought overseas serviced by an Apple designated service center in Korea isn't possible due to local warranty (as opposed to world-wide), so I looked for other ways to get this fixed.


This is when I found this "Screen Glue" manufactured by DiYPRO which claimed to fix screen cracks by filling the gaps with a UV-curing glue. The package, which costs about US$17, comes with 5 ml of the glue and a sheet of instructions. Frankly, the price seemed steep for the amount of glue provided, but if it could get the job done, I thought it wasn't too bad. So I bought a bottle and got to work.

The bottle's cap had a dropper, which you used to drop the glue onto the cracks on the screen. The instructions recommended that I make small droplets along the cracks so that the remaining glue that had not seeped into the cracks would be removed easily.


Once I've applied the glue onto all the cracks, I needed to harden the glue via UV light. I tried putting the phone inside a UV light sanitizer, but this did not work. I suppose it was not tuned to the wavelength needed for hardening. So I left the screen outside for about 30 minutes as the instruction said so that the UV light coming from the Sun would do the work.


After the glue was properly hardened, I removed the droplets on top of the screen. They still had some sticky, slippery residue around it, so they made a bit of a mess that needed some careful cleaning. Once the screen was properly cleaned, though, the cracks that were prominently visible before had largely faded away. I could still see some traces of it in a couple of spots, but it was almost back to normal.

Basically, the product worked pretty much as advertised. If you get hairline cracks on your smartphone like this, touch the screen as little as possible, don't remove the screen protection film that you might have on, and order a glue like this immediately. The quality of the repaired screen goes up that way. It took me about a week before knowing that this sort of glue existed, and by the time I used it, the glass pieces no longer sat completely aligned with each other, which caused the small imperfections.

So is this it? Had my woes with the iPhone 6 Plus screen ended here, the title of this post wouldn't have Part 1, of course. You might wonder - what if the cracks were more severe? I'll get to that in the next part.