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Repairing and Reselling Ipods for Profit!!!!!!

Updated on January 29, 2014

Buy broken Ipods, fix them, then sell them on at a profit

Its really that simple, there is no reason anybody capable of using a screwdriver can't make money fixing ipods, in this lens I will show you how. No prior knowledge of either repair or ipods in general is assumed in this guide, this is the most straightforward repair guide you will ever read!

How to earn a nice 2nd income refurbishing ipods

Repairing Ipods is easy! You don't need any special tools and parts are easy to come by so why not get yourself a steady second income from refurbishing and selling these things.

As with most small electronic gadgets, ipods will eventually break down on you and when an ipod breaks down out of warranty the owner can either pay a small fortune to have it repaired or they can sell it as faulty on ebay. If you look on ebay and do a search for "faulty ipod" (or alternately look a little further down this page at what's on ebay right now) you will probably get a couple of hundred results returned of faulty ipods, all selling for between 20 and 30% of their usual second hand value. These are where you are going to pick up a lot of your raw materials.

The best way to start getting an idea of how this works is to find an ipod with a broken screen, find out how much that particular model sells for second hand and stick a bid in for it of around %30 (taking shipping costs into account) of its second hand value (if it was working), you can get an idea of what you will eventually be able to sell for by searching completed listings. If you win then great, if not don't worry because someone else has paid over the odds, you can just go and find another.

See What's on Ebay Right Now

These are a couple of faulty ipods listed on ebay right now. There is no time like the present, buy one and start to make money fixing ipods today!

Lets Get Repairing

Once you have your ipod with a broken screen you will need a new screen to repair it with. You can either buy a new part which can be expensive although you do get a lot of sellers listing new parts on ebay a lot cheaper than list price, or you can look for another faulty ipod of the same model with a working screen. The beauty of this method is that once you have taken the screen of the second ipod you will still be left with other working parts that you can keep for your next repair project.

Get Fixing

So how do you change out the screen? Ipods are really easy to dismantle and by going through the process of changing a screen you will see all of the major components and learn how to change out all of them as well.

Get yourself some non marking ipod opening tools which are basically 2 thin spatulas and can be bought online quite cheaply. Use these to pry the top plastic part away from the metal bottom shell. Slide the tools along the whole gap and gradually the two halves will come apart. Be careful when you lift the two halves apart because they are still connected to each other via the battery cable and you don't want to damage this. Now you need to remove the hard drive, which is the large rectangular block right in front of you. It is connected to the plastic half by a ribbon cable, so disconnect the cable and carefully lift out the hard drive and put it to one side. There might be some blue or grey plastic blocks (depends what model) near to where the AV cable plugs in, remove these and DON'T LOSE THEM, they are there for a reason. Remember how they sit inside the body (take a picture if necessary) and make sure you put them back when you put the ipod back together.

You should now be able to see a metal frame that holds the logic board to the plastic front. Along the sides are 6 small screws, remove these and put them somewhere safe because if they fall on the carpet you will never find them. Now carefully pull the frame and the plastic front apart. You can now see both sides of the logic board, the logic board is the circuit board that everything else connects to, and on the back side you can see where the screen connects with a ribbon cable. Carefully unplug the screen and fit the new one in its place. Then follow this method in reverse to put the ipod back together.

While the ipod is in pieces, you can see how all the parts connect to the logic board. Make sure you can identify all the main components which are logic board, screen, click wheel, hold switch, hard drive, and battery.

Now you have changed a screen and should also understand how to change any of the components.

Once your ipod is back together, plug it into itunes and make sure it is all working, refer to the 5 R's on Apple's website to make sure all the software is working. Once you are happy with it, get it listed on ebay and sold. So lets recap, you have bought two broken ipods for 30 each for example and sold a working one for 100. Taking ebay and paypal fees into account you have made a 35 profit. Once you get more experienced you should be able to strip down an ipod repair it and put it back together in about half an hour which means your new second income is paying 70 an hour. Not a bad rate I'm sure you will agree. Also, you will later on be able to spot exactly what is wrong with an ipod just from the listing, don't be afraid to ask sellers questions, sometimes you will even pick up ipods that only need their software reinstalled and make even more money off them. Just be aware that unscrupulous ipod resellers may be putting together ipods out of all their faulty parts and selling them as faulty. If you get one of these you have just lost your money because the only useful part is the casing. To protect yourself against this, look at the sellers feedback, what they are currently selling and what they have sold recently. If they are buying and selling a lot of ipods then be a bit wary of them.

Also, for every ipod you intend to sell, try to buy a faulty one that is boxed with all its accessories. When you sell an ipod you will get the best price if it is in a good box and has original apple headphones and USB cable. You don't need all of them to be boxed because once you have used all the working parts from a particular ipod you will be either scrapping it or selling the empty shell.

Once you start getting good at this, you can open up another income stream by advertising your services as an ipod repairer. You can either do this online or by placing ads in your local newspaper. The main thing to remember here is to always repair ipods with new parts. A customer is always going to expect a repair to be carried out using new parts unless you explicitly tell them otherwise (and offer a discount for doing so), and if they find out they have been charged full price for a used part they will not be happy. Find out what part they need and charge them separately for parts and labour, that way you can never go wrong.

One final thing to remember is when you sell your ipods on, remember to wipe all the songs off the hard drive. It might be tempting to push your final selling price up by offering them preloaded with a couple of hundred songs, but don't so it. If you do you will be breaking copyright law and if you get caught you will be in some hot water.

So that's about it, good luck and happy fixing.

Future Classic Gadgets

100 years in the future, which gadget will have pride of place in a museum of early 21st century technology?

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Just one more thing....

If you have found this lens useful and I can see from my traffic reports a lot of people have, I would be grateful if you could leave a comment on the guestbook below and hit the "like" button. I am about to start work on a few more easy repair and profit guides, possibly for iphones, smartphones, and diagnosing and fixing common faults on games consoles, so let me know if there are any devices you would particularly like repair guides for.

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