ballgrounds.net – blogging about basketball and everything else coming my way

You might have ran into the same problem. The scrollball of Apple’s Mighty Mouse does not respond as well as it did before when you used the mouse for several month already. Today I had enough of rubbing the ball with a moist or dry cloth or doing some crazy experiments with tape or what ever you may find on the net to make this go away… I just wanted to hurt this little m…..f…… ]:)

Before you read on or even do the same to your mouse as I did keep in mind: the grey ring from the bottom of the mouse that has to be removed will break with a chance of something around 100% – there might even happen worse things when you are not carefull with the tools – but after the operation is complete – your mouseball will scroll as it did on day one. Basically it is a simple cleaning of parts but Apple wanted to give us a hard time getting this done. In case you have to redo the entire session, the grey ring is already removed and things will go much faster.
By the way – you do this at your own risk! I will not get you a new mouse in case you screw up yours :)

Now, what I did was crack the mouse open with a knife. To do so you just need to drive a knife/screwdriver (carefully!!! do not cut yourself or the internals of the mouse) between the grey “ring” and the side buttons of your mouse. The ring is clotted to the upper case of the mouse, so you have to crack it apart by carefully tilting the blade.
Once the ring is removed (even if it breaks as it did in my case) enter the mouse with the screwdriver at the rear end at the left then at the right and open it. There are two plastic studs – one on every side that are only clicked in the bottom part of the mouse and will release it pretty easily.

When this is done, remove the two connector plugs by carefully lifting the plugs, then pull the flat cables out. Now remove the mouse’s cord at the front and the upper and bottom parts are completely disconnected.

In order to clean the scrollball and the four “wheels” (see images) unscrew the black plastic part from the upper case and carefully detach the white part that is only stuck on the black part holding the scrollball and the wheels in place.

Once the filth is removed from the parts (especially the wheels look nasty as you can seen on the images) your next step is to reassemble it. Make sure to insert the wheels the same way and direction as you removed them. Otherwise they won’t turn and the scrollball will not work! This part is a little tricky but still doable even for people like me having big hands that easily can grab and hold a basketball or two ;)

After this is done fix the black part with the three screws to the upper part of the mouse and reconnect the flat connectors to their plugs. The width shows you which one fits where. Now connect your mouse to your computer and do a mouse test. If all is fine continue with the final steps.

The operation is completed by putting the mouse cord at the front back in place and by just clicking the bottom part in the upper case. Put the side buttons in the upper part first then click the bottom between the studs at the rear of the mouse. Done!

I had to remove quite some dirt but now my Mighty Mouse is working perfect again :) Ok, the ring broke but who cares? It’s at the bottom. Nobody will see it. The mouse still moves perfect since it only sits on the bottom part and for moving the mouse this ring has nothing to do but making the mouse look nice from the desk’s/mousepad’s point of view ;)