Ibook G4 painting

I believe someone used fabric dye and put the plastics in hot water to dye the plastic a new color.

Sadly, the only exterior parts from an iBook G3's enclosure that will work with an iBook G4 are the display housing, display bezel, and keyboard (made a neat backlit keyboard with an iBook G3 kb for an iBook g4 some years ago. The bottom case won't work due to the slot loading drive, and the top case won't work because the electronic connections are different.

Hope this helps.

The problem with the g3 iBook bottom case vs the g4 iBook bottom case is that the g3 bottom case has less plastic in the area surrounding the optical drive than the g4. As such, you could probably put one in it's place, but it won't look great.

As for the keyboard, I removed the label backing from the g3 keyboard (thus exposing the holes in the metal base), used some double sided tape, and attached some salvaged fibre optic strands from a broken 15" pbg4 top case. Wired the connectors for it to draw power from the internal usb port (intended for bluetooth) and it worked. Some caveats were that I had to remove the top emi shield (the thin metal stuff between the keyboard and heatsink/logic board area) and the modem in order to accomodate the light source for the backlight. It was an ugly hack, but it worked. The biggest problem was that there was no control for it so the backlit keyboard was always on (even in sleep) draining the battery faster, and occasionally messing up the power management unit. (pmu reset every other week).

I still have the keyboard around the house somewhere. That iBook is long gone.