Vintage mighty mouse

filed in Modifications on Jul.11, 2006

Index:

Introduction
Ingredients
Leftovers
External view
Inside the mouse
Conclustion
Links

Although being completely satisfied with my Apple Mighty Mouse I bought on ebay a couple of weeks ago I couldn’t refrain myself from ‘moding’ it. In my endless quest of personality enhancement for mice I bought an authentic and vintage Apple ADB mouse on an auction site. The ground idea for this transformation is quite similar to my other mouse mod: trying to make the inside of a mighty mouse fit into a vintage ADB mouse to obtain a lovely and fully featured modern mouse with an breathtaking vintage look.

'original' apple mighty mouse Once again I had no digital camera at the time I made this mod, hence you will only see pictures of the finished mod.

Ingredients:

One Apple ADB Mouse.
One Apple Mighty Mouse.
An drilling machine (adjustable speed) and various drill bits.
A Victorinox Swiss Army Knife.
Various small files.
A soldering iron.
Epoxy putty.

Leftovers:

As shown on picture bellow you end I ended up with a few spare bits and blobs: The ADB mouse inner-electronics and it’s ball, the mighty mouse plastic enclosure and it’s internal second and pressure sensitive clic frame. If one day I get bored of the vintage mouse and want to reassemble the original mighty mouse I’ll be able to do so.

Apple mighty mouse leftovers

External view:

The improvements of my enhanced apple ADB mouse over the original are the weight (ball removed) and an extra the scroll ball that is placed on the side, under the thumb (if your right handed).

Finished vintage mighty mouse

Below is an underside view of the modified mighty mouse. The internal board was taped to protect it from people wanting to put a finger inside the ball hole.

Underside of the modified ADB mouse

Inside the mouse:

After taking the two mouses apart it was an nice surprise to discover that their internal electronic boards are almost identical in dimensions. This in fact helped a lot. However I had to dig the ADB mouse case to remove the internal relief made by ball opening mechanism (I melted it with the iron so that it doesn’t open anymore). And it took me quite a while to find the adequate drilling equipment to dig the side of the mouse where the scroll ball is now placed (I used a PCB drilling device).

Inside of the vintage mighty mouse - please notice the tape sensors on the left (they are capacity sensors detecting which finger clicks!)

The following four pictures detail the side scroll ball placement and the original ADB click switch on the mighty mouse’s main board. I used epoxy mastic to hold and stick the scroll ball and the click switch in the required position.

Conclusion:

After a few days spent on that project, the mouse mod was finally achieved and amazingly… functioning! Unfortunately I had to remove the ’squeeze click’ feature because it would have been extremely hard to fit in the vintage mouse’s body.
In the end, the mouse feature three clicks and a scroll ball, which is, in my opinion largely enough. All that with a stunning vintage look! As you can see on the two pictures bellow the scroll ball is placed just bellow the user’s thumb which in my opinion a million times more comfortable.

In the future I will probably get rid of the ADB connector altogether and solder a Grey USB type A connector… (the black inline socket on the picture bellow is a simple SVHS female connector).

Thank you Barbara for your precious help!