Housing-swapping an Aluminium Apple Watch to Stainless Steel - pt.1

Recently, I checked out the titanium Apple Watches at the Apple Store.

Now the thing is, I currently own an Apple Watch Series 7 in Black Aluminium but I’ve always really liked the stainless steel Apple Watches but could never really justify the price difference. So I thought “Why not just housing swap my Apple Watch the way people housing swap their gameboys?”

So I dug around the internet looking for a Stainless Steel Apple Watch Series 7 housing at a decent price. I came across a few listings on Aliexpress but thought that the pricing was a bit steep for just the housing so I continued my search. I found a local UK supplier that had the housing for £39.60.

Hint: If you’re looking to do this mod yourself, online sellers tend to call this housing part the ‘Stainless Steel Middle Frame’

I watched a YouTube tutorial on swapping the housing on a Series 7 and then ordered the necessary tools as well as the housing itself.

The parts and tools took around two weeks to arrive and all in all looked something like this:

• Hair dryer
• Screwdriver kit - only the triwing was used
• Curved Screen separator
• B700 Adhesive
• New Battery
• Pry tools
• Spare Watch Strap ejection springs
• Tweezers
• Magnetic Screw Mat

I started trying to disassemble the watch with the video and this is where it all started going wrong.

Initially, I tried to separate the display from the housing using the thin aluminium sheets I found on Aliexpress but I found that they were too thin and couldn’t pry the display up before bending themselves. — I don’t recommend you buy these for this mod.

I went onto the QianLi curved display disassembler and this seemed more promising.

However, whilst I was cutting the adhesive on the corner, the OLED display got damaged. When the watch had turned on after I accidentally hit the power button, I could see a green line across the screen. Oh dear.

I was wondering for a while then about what to do and finally chose to decide to keep prying and to get a replacement display. This turned out to be quite the destructive tactic as seen below:

Make sure to press your curved screen disassembler straight down the frame before prying up — otherwise you are likely to only reach halfway and separate the OLED from the digitizer as I have done above (the airbubble).

I’m now waiting for my replacement display to arrive and will update you in pt.2!