I made a mistake when replacing my battery on my 3G iPod today. I didn’t understand how careful I was supposed to be when opening the case. The ribbon cable that connects your earphone jack to the main board is quite delicate, especially after several years. In fact, it almost looks like it is deliberately under-manufactured, but nobody would do that, would they? The ribbon cable is barely held on to the jack by a tab of plastic that seems to have deteriorated over time. The plastic came right off and with it, some of the ribbon cable. I pressed the plastic back on, to no avail. The end result is no earbud functionality. Silence. A moment of, if you please.

The iPod still works great though, and I use it with the Griffin Roadtrip in the car and my iHome clock radio. And of course, it still makes a great firewire back-up device for my older PowerBook DVI. The battery life is much better now. It had deteriorated to about 30 minutes. Of course, now that I don’tr use it in any scenario where it isn’t connected to power, the battery upgrade is kinda, well, you get it.

Anyway, here’s my tips for battery replacement on 3G iPod:

1) from what I could tell, the kits on eBay are all the same, but I could be wrong about that. I paid ten bucks for mine.

2) The plastic tools that come with the kit won’t crack the case. You’ll need a very thin flexible blade knife to pry back the metal part of the case next to the fast forward button. Insert the blade between the plastic and metal and then pry the metal case back wide nough to insert one of the plastic tools. You can then remove the knife and insert the other plastic tool as per the instructions. Opening the case should work as advertised from there on in.

3) When the case is cracked open and all tabs on once side have popped, be very, very careful how you open the iPod. The ribbon cable that connects the earbud plug to the main board may have deteriorated, and if it peels off like mine did, getting your earbuds to work again will be an unknown and unlikely task without some serious intervention by someone who knows how to fix microelectronics.

4) You will need a very specific type of tiny screw driver to loosed the screw on the main board next to the batter cable connector on the main board. It is a five star tip. Very small. Usually comes in those little plastic kits with precision screwdrivers. Otherwise you can carefull loosen it using the tip of the thin blade knife you used to pry the case open. I did this, and nothing bad came of it, but I could see how it might have gone wrong if the blade of the knife had scraped the wrong surface. Try to use the proper screwdriver.

5) I loosened off only the one screw next to the power cable jack. The reason for doing this is the battery’s connector cable goes under the mainboard, not over it, before coming back up and being connected to the top of the board. I suspect the case won’t close unless the battery cable is under the main board. I lifted the edge of the main board and slipped the cables underneath using the tip of a tiny, blunt phillips screwdriver. Then I tightened the screw back down to secure the main board. After that, the case pops back together with ease.

Like I said, the process would have been fine had I known how delicate the ribbon cable connection is (or had become over time). Be careful or you’ll wind up with a sonicly-challenged iPod. Time to get the new video iPod I guess.