Don,

It worked! Thanks for the info that made me bold enough to squeeze those
plastic pieces hard enough to get some of the "fingers" (tabs on
fingers(?)) to pop out of the grooves. See what follows for a few of my
comments interspersed about what you had said.

In article , D Yuniskis
wrote:

On 2/11/2011 3:25 PM, Joe wrote:
I have a Que Fire, model QPS-525. I would like to remove the Teac CD
burner and replace it with a bare Combo drive (CD Read/Write and DVD
Read). How do I open that plastic case that encloses the drive? The only
visible screws are very small ones on the back that look like they only
hold the on/off switch and the firewire ports to a black plastic panel.
Thanks.

If it is similar to the other Que's that I've had, the
"accent colored" pieces (wrap over each side and another
on the front) snap off.

The third "accent colored" piece is on the back, but nothing really
different about its being there.


Once they are off, you'll understand
how to *get* them off (catch-22) -- hard to explain, here.
(putting them on, you kind of have to *hook* one half and
then "stretch" the other half -- of each *piece* -- until
it clicks into place)

IIRC, once these are off, the top and bottom halves of the
shell separate.


Nope, once I had the "accent colored" pieces off, the sumbitch was still
solidly held together. There are three tabs X 2 on the translucent
colorless halves, and they come apart in the same way that the other
pieces came off. But the front-most tabs on fingers were a real biyatch
to open, even though I had already honed my tab-releasing skills on the
preceding eight tabs. Holey moley, Batman!

Just remember: plastic breaks!

Disassembled without breaking any of it!


I can't recall the role of the screws you mentioned. Can't
hurt to take them out *first* and see what else loosens up.


Didn't have to loosen those screws.

You should probably test new drive cabled into the case
*before* reassembling.

Absolutely! I have been playing with it for (mumble) some time now, and
some things work, others don't. The interesting thing is that my internal
CD DVD R & W won't read some data Maxell DVD-R's that *it* burned but the
DVD reader that is now in the Que Fire *will* read those DVD-R's.


HTH,
--don

And the whole operation only took like 15 minutes! Yeah, right, April Fool

--- Joe