This may sound like a difficult feat, but in all honesty it was pretty simple: I just held a soldering iron to a lump of plastic for a while. The toxic fumes still tinge the ambience of my flat, and I now have a dull headache.
Still, I consider that my undoubtedly shortened lifespan is more than worth it. I actually melted two bits of plastic today: the first was to drill a hole in the top of my robot R2-D2; inside this hole I've mounted a simple push switch that will, eventually, chargeh mah lazer.
Now there's just a bit of wiring and reassembly left on the laser-R2-D2 mod project. I just wish I could manage to reprogram the voice recognition so I could command R2 to fire the laser off. Oh well.
The other bit of plastic I destroyed in an unorthodox manner pertains to my long-running project of building my own miniature game console. I want a totally self-contained unit. I already have the LCD and the microcontroller that will form the core of the system; what I'm missing is the actual logic to drive the LCD with some kind of active signal.
The main holdup here has been the ribbon cable that provides input to the LCD. To put it simply, the pins are damn near invisibly tiny. I can't come even remotely close to soldering my own wires onto the leads, which means I really can't send much in the way of signal to the LCD.
However, I may have a solution. Since I have a big pile of spare ribbon cables for the thing, I decided to try taking one and melting the insulation off in a few choice locations, so I could spot-solder my leads more conveniently.
Turns out that this works pretty damn well. I have five pins soldered up successfully now: the +8V rails for the backlight's inverter, and the ground leads for both the backlight and the signal circuit. This means that the screen lights up and displays a nice empty black. Opening the ground pin for the signal circuit turns the display a 1-pixel checkerboard white-black pattern.
So now my next project is to locate the input pins for the composite video support, and wire them up. These will then be connected to my VCR to see if I can get a picture on the LCD. If that actually works... I'll probably crap my pants.
