Mighty mouse makeover
1 August, 2007 – 12:45 pmI’ve been having a lot of problems with my Apple mighty mouse lately. Particularly with the scroll wheel which would scroll up but not down. I think eating chips and surfing the web was getting things too greasy. Apple lend us some advice here on how to clean your wheel in a non-destructive manner.
But if you’re like me on holidays, and you feel like getting busy with a stanley knife and that troublesome mouse you can follow these instructions.
1. The first thing you need to do is remove the retaining ring around the bottom of the mouse. This thing is glued in place so a razor blade will go a long way. Just slide it in around the squeeze points and cut. Think thumbs here…
2. Once the ring is removed, you can pull apart the main assembly. Start with the forward edge of the mouse body and lift up gently, you will hear it click out. Then on the tail end, rock it out of the shell where you can see the little plastic pivot points. Be careful with the attached ribbons …
3. Be careful, as you remove the main assembly, the shell will be connected by two ribbons. You just slide the black clips out for these ribbons and the ribbons can be disconnected leaving you with just the shell.
4. Finally, you can remove the entire wheel assembly from the shell by unscrewing three tiny phillips head screws. I didn’t have a proper screw driver and one of the screws was glued in, so I just compromised and cut that bad boy off! 
5. Clean all the working parts, I used a bit of metho to give it a good clean, and was surprised by the amount of gunk built up under the shell assembly around the wheel. Probably why following Apple’s advice only gave me temporary results. Put it all back together again. You might want to re-glue the retaining ring but I didn’t bother. The mouse stays together fine without it but I guess lint and fluff from your laptop bag will probably get in there without it …
