[Nexus 7 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] DeGon:
OK. Done. I assembled everything again.

First I glued the glass to the bezel. Be sure to remove the protective film on the inner side of the digitizer. Of course you should avoid any pollution of the glass. Then I slipped the cleaned LCD in place. Also the LCD should be as clean as possible. Allignment of the LCD was not difficult, I just made sure, that the LCD has 1mm space to all sides of the bezel (there won't be more than 1mm). To make sure the LCD won't move, I pressed some Sugru in the space. That will fix the LCD at the right place and will be easy enough to remove. Then I reassembled everything.

The result is quite good. My Nexus is fully useable, the touchscreen is as precise as eg. on my HTC One X+. But there are two little points that are not perfect:

1. I have some traces and a few little dust speckles on the inner side of the glass I should have wiped away. During assembly, the digitizer glass fell from my table (I screamed in horror!) and it survived (!). But some dust particles sticked to it. I tried to wipe em away, but on the other side there was still a protective film wich had some traces too and I couldn't see if I cleaned it good enough. But this flaw I could correct, by opening it again (but as I only see these traces, when the screen is off, I am not in a hurry for opening the thing again.

2. As the LCD is not glued to the glass now, there are points where the glass is tighly on the LCD and areas, where it's lifted just a nanometer or so. When the screen is off (and only then) I see the points, where the glass is flat and tight on the LCD. Theres like little rainbow artifact around these points. Sometimes I also see that by pressing certain points of the digitizer. But also this flaw is not so serious in my eyes, as I have the benefit to be able to remove the glass easily, next time it breaks.

Would I recommend to fix a Nexus 7 this way (by separating the digitizer from the LCD)?

Not unless you like doing such stuff or you just can't afford the LCD/digitizer combo.

It takes a lot of time to separate the LCD from the glass, even more to clean it, and it also takes some time to glue it on the bezel (at least when you take thin double sided tape like I did). Even more serious is the fact, that many things can go wrong. You could destroy or damage the LCD, you could damage some electronic components (or these tiny clamps holding down the touchscreen cable connectors), you can smash the glass on assembly (or drop it from the table) and so on...

Prices for the combo came down and will continue to do so, as Nexus 7.2 is on the horizon. So maybe it's better to grab one of these...

Cost of my operation:

- a Nexus 7 16GB with a broken glass (unfortunately in my case also a damaged LCD): 50$

- a digitizer from aliexpress.com: 30$ incl. shipping

- some air refresher containing lemonene from swiss retailer Migros: 5$

- some double sided tape (3M 300LSE) from ebay: 5$ incl shipping

- another original AND fully working LCD with shattered glass from ebay: 16$ incl shipping

- a bit of Sugru (l already had that and and it could be replaced with glue or something)

- around 8-12 hours work, even much more if you add up the time for reading and ordering stuff (and writing such long posts)

Of course you could do that faster, if you do it often enough.

Anyway, I just wanted to say: Yes, it is possible to just replace only the broken glass of an Asus Nexus 7...