How to remove the Xbox Jewel.
First off, some of you may ask me what the Xbox Jewel is. It's located in the center on the top of the xbox, it's that green circle. It's actually a plastic disc.
Now that's clarified, we can talk about removing it. The removal process is the hardest part of any jewel modification. The reason being; it's on there pretty fucking good. It's a piece of cheap plastic stuck on more cheap plastic by a nice layer of foam adhesive.
There are three main ways of removing the jewel;
Heat.
Chemical
Frost
Before you choice one or all of the methods above, we need to take the shielding off the underside of the Xbox top, it'll make things easier for later. Pick up a small flathead screw driver and start jabbing at the prongs/flaps holding the tin to the plastic screw mounts. There should be five or six of these suckers.
Alright, throw that piece of tin to the side, you probably won't need it later if you want to drill out the hole under the jewel.
Heat Method
Alot of kids swear by this method as the best, I on the other hand see this as the best way to melt your top. The first division in this method is the hair dryer trick. Heating the back and front of the Xbox top for a short period of time to melt the glue holding the jewel on can be VERY tricky, not to mention the part where you need to stick a butter knife under one side of the jewel and pry.
Brandon Greene and I tried this as our first method because of the popularity and success stories from Xbox-Scene.com but we started to see something other than progress. It was melting plastic. The back started to smush up a bit from being heated, the jewel even looked a little floaty sitting in its reservoir. After seeing this we quicky stopped and never tried it again. Lesson learned. If you want a quick way to melt your shit, go for the heat technique. Otherwise skip this one if you want a less risky approach.
Chemical Method
The myth here is, you fill the indent where the jewel is resting with enough Goo-Gone to incase it in this gel and eventually it will come off easily after a little prying. So you pour your Goo-Gone into the jewel resevoir and wait a couple hours. Come back, stick a knife under one side and let it sit another couple hours. After you've wasted a day lubing your Xbox top up, you slowly repeat all of this over and over while adding another knife three hours to the left in a clockwise or counter-clockwise fashion and it will come off, glue and all. From there you just have to worry about cleaning all that grease off your Xbox.
I have never tried this method. The next jewel I remove will definitely recieve this treatment. This sounds very ideal and fool proof by letting the chemicals do all the work for you.
Frost Method
This method involved the same concept except using the opposite temperature, duh. Throw the Xbox top in the freezer for awhile, bend the top over your knee/use a butter knife and the jewel will pop right out.
"Put the top of your Xbox in the freezer, I'll be over in a half hour" says Brandon. So I throw the sucker in the freezer for 45 minutes before Brandon gets here and we get down to business. Just before he called me, he said he got his to work from freezing it for a half hour. Although he didn't use a technique as slick as bending and twisting the top over the knee, I do give him credit for his caveman like technique.....slapping the back of the top with a shoe....yeah. As he convinces me that this is the way to go, we try it. Nothing happens.
Eventually we pull out the butter knife and pry for awhile at it and we still get nothing. The top becomes room temperature and the butter knife begins to scratch the surface of the top, then...CRACK!
Brandon snapped it into three pieces. Normally I'd be pretty pissed but it's Brandon, he didn't mean it and he felt really bad about it. Bad enough to give me his jewel. Didn't want to accept it from him, but he insisted. "I broke it, I fix it. Here." Lesson learned here. Cold isn't the way to go either, unless you have Cro-Magnon skills with a shoe.
The glue has to go somewhere, better to be on your xbox. Either situation has one cure.
Throw that on the foam adhesive and let it soak the mineral spirits. In less than a minute it should be easily scratched off with a thumb nail.
BE CAREFUL
If you use this on the jewel itself, you will lose shine and texture. Once the jewel has been exposed to the liquid it becomes cloudy and loses its smooth feel. If this happens to you, that's ok! You're never at a total loss. In this case you can repair it to even better than new. Hell, I'd do this even if I didn't get any mineral spirits on it in the first place!
Jewel after exposure to mineral spirits.
So what's the secret to shining the jewel?
Toothpaste!
Put a dime sized amount on a wash cloth, dampen the cloth, and start rubbing like mad. I really don't think the grit of the toothpaste will matter if you go in a certain direction, so have a blast.
The end result
Check out my next tutorial;
Clearing the Jewel
