[PDA2, XDA IIi, 2020i General] TommyGun:
Hello everyone!

I actually managed to change the digitizer of the LCD of XDA II. To answer the previous questions first:

Yes - the digitizer can be separated from LCD, although it is not easy. I used an old fashioned razor blade to do it, since these are very,very thin and do not put excessive pressure onto the digitizer screen during the pressure. The digitizer is made of very fragile glass panel and glued onto LCD with a double sided sellotape (at least looks like it, when removed..) Glue is very sticky and I had to take great care not to brake the old digitizer - took me 2h to remove it. In general braking the old one is not really a big deal as long as the LCD itself is not damaged by the sharp edges of the digitizer glass. Since the risk is there I figured I'd spend a bit more time on removal but at least be sure about a positive outcome of the project. There was a certain screen protector on my device, not installed by me since I acquired the gadget on e-bay. I took care of removing it from digitizer first and only then proceeded to remove the digitizer from LCD.

The digitizer has 4 connections soldered to the LCD. Opening the soldered contacts is simple, if one has any background in soldering at all. The difficult part is to remove the digitizer from LCD, really. Another difficult part seemed to be the soldering of the new one. There are XDA digitizers on the ebay, they do not have the same contact as the XDA manufactured ones so the really difficult part was figuring out how to create the contact. The old one had 4 contacts soldered in a small rectangle going clockwise from lowest left towards lowest right..

The solution does not look exactly elegant, but who cares how the gadget looks on the inside, as long as it works! :) The 4 contact block of the newly bought digitizer was divided into 4 separate hair-thin contacts and the two outermost contacts (those that come on the left lowest corner and right lowest corner of the small rectangle connection) were soldered first, then a bit of an isolation tape (a simple synthetic tape used for paper repairs et cetera) was applied over the freshly soldered contacts to prevent short circuiting. After that the two upper contacts were soldered and those covered with another piece of tape.

The new digitizer came with double sided tape as well, so after careful alignment it was easy to glue it in the place of the old one. The main thing during this process is to clean the LCD and digitizer from all dirt and fingerprints, I used alchol for that - vodka, to be exact. I reapplied the screen protector to the casing before putting the complete lcd+digitizer block into the device, but I suppose not all screen protectors can be reapplied that easily..

In the end the connection looked crazy but in principle all was as should be and after the reassembly the device was 100% alive again with the screen aligning properly! :) It was certainly a risky business but I bought the faulty XDA for 60GBP and the digitizer for 10GBP, 70GBP for a fully working XDA is a bargain I think, not to mention an excellent adrenaline rush during some moments of the project:)

I can provide the pictures of the finished connection if needed, it will require me to disassemble my Alpine again though..