Definitely looks yellow in this picture, but its pretty close in person. It’s not Valve Orange, it’s Flea’s Almost Valve Orange (The way it looks in the pictures where the parts are being painted is a lot closer to how it looks in person.)

TLDR: I painted things on my OLED deck to make myself feel special and feel like I got an LE. Instructions and pictures below.

Sorry for the novel. When the OLED was announced I really liked the look of the limited edition models. What I did not like was the nearly $700 USD price tag (I think it’s fairly priced just outside what I was willing to spend). I had gotten my first deck, an LCD 64 GB delivered the day before the OLED was announced & I already bought a 2TB SSD while waiting for the first one to arrive, so the 512GB OLED was right in the sweet spot for me after a refund of the LCD deck. I only really cared about the clear shell and orange accents in terms of OLED vs LE OLED, and I’m sure a clear front shell will be available eventually (I’ve heard you can use existing front shells but I’m going to wait until I get more concrete confirmation on that). In the meantime, I wanted to recreate some of the accents that I easily could, so I figured I could do the fan vent mesh on the back and the screws with some spray paint and elbow grease. I’ve never really done much console customization, my only other experience is the SSD on here & a back shell and JoyCon shell swap for my Switch, which is pretty dang easy. I’ve built my own computer four times and enjoy tinkering but this is definitely a different skill set. I really wanted to do the vent cover along the top of the Deck as well, but that looked like a very long and difficult process that I do not feel equipped for yet lol. I’ve never used spray paint and know next to nothing in terms of technique, which one to use for what materials etc. With that being said, this was a few hours of work for some easy personalization. Just because I wanted to recreate the orange of the LE, doesn’t mean you couldn’t do just about anything you want. I’ll leave a list of what I needed and did, but please be aware that with someone more experienced, you could definitely do this A LOT better than I did, and probably come up with some pretty interesting stuff. Maybe some art of stuff coming out of the vent. I tried to find replacement vent covers online, one already painted or even just replacements but wasn’t able to find anything. I’m sure you could make some awesome stuff with a full scale screen print of some kind or maybe stencils.
I AM IN NO WAY RECOMMENDING YOU DO OR TRY THIS, ANY MODS YOU DO ARE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

What I wanted to recreate

OLED on first disassemble, you can zoom in and see the fan vent cover/rivets in the top right

Left side and top two on right are cut in this picture, but you get the idea. Exacto the heads off, try to not mark up the shell like I did. I did notice the left side was missing half of the rivet head before I did anything but I’m sure that’s normal and within QC margin of error, it was in no way an issue and even a benefit in my case. There is some tape you will have to peel back but I just used the needle nose tweezers and went slow.

The canvas I used to keep track of the screws and paint them, ignore my ugly handwriting

Setup for painting, definitely not the cream of the crop but worked for me. This was the second attempt and I don’t have the third on picture but you can see what I meant by the paint flaking. It’s way too cold so I had to improvise a bit and basically run outside, paint it, run back inside and let it dry in the heat on the third attempt. Still came out a bit flaky/chalky but definitely better than letting it dry in the cold

Screws and their canvas after painting

What I did:

• Painted the backplate fan vent mesh cover and backplate screws to replicate the OLED LE.

What I used:

• IFixIt “Essential Electronics Toolkit”, got it for around $30 USD from my local BestBuy, very useful to have around
  • Torx T6, Blue Plastic Prying Pick, Plastic Spudger, Needle Nose Tweezers, needed these to take the Deck apart (easily/without damage, I’m sure it can be done with just the Torx bit)
• Exacto Knife
• Piece of Cardboard (or canvas in my case) for the screws
• Can of Spray Paint (you would probably benefit from some sort of a clear coat but I ended up using a matte or flat finish paint and didn’t think to get any until I was already knee deep)
  • I used a can of Montana Gold NC-Acrylic spray paint in “Power Orange”. It came out a bit brighter/lighter than what I imagine the LE looks like in person, but overall I’m not mad at it and definitely keeping it how it is with this paint. I got it from my local Michaels for around $15 USD (Bring your ID lol) The way it looks in the pictures where the parts are being painted is a lot closer to how it looks in person.
• I used guitar strings to suspend it from a ceiling and another to weigh it down and keep it from flopping around. Probably not the best mounting technique but what I was able to come up with. Creativity or a better setup is certainly a huge help with something like this.

How I did it:

• Disassemble the backplate from the deck, I am not an expert and am not going to explain how to do that. I used RetroGameCorp’s OLED review (love this YT channel highly recommend it), and IFixIt’s Legion Go vs OLED teardown video to help with the things that have changed between LCD and OLED model. IIRC there isn’t an difference for this project except torx screws, but main one is the big piece of tape and interconnect cable connected to the motherboard shroud but that doesn’t affect this project at all. Go slow and take your time, especially when prying the backshell from the front. It’s very easy to mark up the seam between the two if you are too rough. I used the plastic guitar pick shaped pry tools in the IFixIt kit to pop the first lock, and then pull the shell apart by hand for the rest. Be firm but gentile.
• KEEP TRACK OF WHAT SCREW GOES WHERE, I usually just use the lid of the IFixIt kit, but seeing as they were going to be painted, I marked up a piece of canvas that had a hole in it and that I wasnt going to use, and used the sharp point of the spudger to make little holes for each screw. Be careful pushing the screws through whatever you use, if I’m not mistaken the inner screws are fine threaded and I have no clue if cardboard or canvas could hurt those threads at all, so I just took extra care in that regard. See pictures below if this is at all confusing.
• Extracting the fan vent mesh was a bit trickier than I had originally expected, as I thought it was held down by screws when I first saw it doing the SSD. I was sad to see it is actually held down by plastic rivets when I started this project. I decided to cut the heads of the rivets off with an exacto knife and patient cuts to not damage the backplate. After about ten minutes it was free. Again, see pictures if confusing. There is some tape you’ll have to pry off of the top edge, I just used the needle nose tweezers and went slow. It came up pretty easy and I just taped it down folding the edge into itself. You can push the vent free from the holes on the other side once each rivet is cut. I made sure to leave a bit of material from each rivet so that the vent would still have a defined place to sit.
• Clean everything really well before painting, if you don’t the paint wont stick to the surface. I used 70% isopropyl alcohol and a microfiber towel to dry it all off.
• PLEASE follow correct precautions when messing around with spray paint. The screws are pretty self explanatory from here on out. Spray them on the cardboard or whatever you used, having them pushed all the way down to stop the paint from getting on any of the threads. Be careful not to overspray the screw heads otherwise you’ll have a big chunk shear off when reassembling the deck. The rounded outside edge shouldn’t have much paint on it if you want to avoid that. Like I said above, and as pictured, I used two guitar strings on either end of the fan vent cover and suspended it from the ceiling and anchoring it down. On my first attempt I didn’t have an anchor and it went horribly. Do not try to hold it there with something at the back otherwise the paint will pool up, as what happened with my second attempt. You want to come at it from a horizontal angle as to avoid pooling in the holes, which can affect thermal performance. This whole thing might cause a slight increase in temps but I find that unlikely if painted correctly. I’m sure someone disagrees. Paint debris flying around and in your cooling solution is no good. Go slow and spray evenly, keeping 6-7 inches away (according to the label on my paint can, YMMV). I only needed two coats for the vent, and one for the screws, but I’m sure other colors may need more or less. I unfortunately did not think to do a clear coat until I was already pretty much done, but that would’ve probably been for the best to do. If I find it to be a huge issue that I didn’t, I’ll be sure to update this post.
• If you do need to restart, High Acetone Nail Polish remover turned the paint to water in seconds and didn’t visibly harm the existing black paint on the mesh. I just grabbed a small cup and dunked the whole thing when I needed to reset. Wash with water, dry, and try again.
• LET IT DRY. GIVE IT TIME. If you use the same paint I did, you might have to brush off the vent cover a little to avoid getting orange paint debris all up in your cooling system which I’m very confident is not cash money. I used a soft bristle $2 toothbrush from the grocery store and brushed until I didn’t see paint flying around under a flashlight. Again, I’m sure a clear coat is not a bad idea, and would probably totally mitigate this step/issue.
• Reassemble everything. I used a small dab of crazy glue at the center of the long edges on the shell and it seems to be holding fine. Didn’t want to do anything too permanent until I was sure the lack of clear coat isn’t a critical issue, but I’m sure you could come up with a number of ways of getting it to stay. It seemed like there was a small area it call fall into unsecured so that was the only reason I didn’t just leave it friction fitted. Be careful with the screws as this is not a very durable customization solution. I used a piece of a ZipLoc bag to avoid tearing into the paint too bad with the torx bit. It is certainly a bit tighter of a fit now with the T6 bit but as long as you go as light as I did, I had no issues.

That’s it. It was pretty easy and overall, for $15 USD considering I already owned the tools I needed, I’m very happy with how it came out.