Hinges for a laptop lid — what could be simpler?

The main task is to give the lid a smooth open and close while it holds its position at any angle. The lid with the panel in it is not light, so the hinges have to be strong and long-lived. To hold the lid at an arbitrary angle, the preload must be even across the whole range of opening. The panel and touchscreen ribbon cables have to pass through those same hinges, and ideally the coaxial lead of the WiFi/BT antenna as well. The enclosure is made of ABS, which is not that resistant to such loads and wears at those spots. Making fully metal hinges with inserts is beyond what I can do at the moment (and how repairable such hinges would be is an open question too). Buying ready-made hinges from laptop models already on the market is not my way of doing things.

So for the experiments I ordered a huge number of springs, thin metal washers, nylon washers, a pile of standoffs, M2 and M2.5 screws and a bit of other small stuff. The wide panel ribbon and the touchscreen ribbon make it harder still. The touchscreen one can be lived with — it runs over UART or I2C and there are not that many lines, five or six — but the display ribbon has 31 lines, which works out to at least a centimetre of ribbon width. Making the hinge mechanism as large as on the ASUS Eee PC is ruled out both by my philosophy and by the size of the gadget itself.

The hinge mechanism of the ASUS Eee PC

At the moment there is a hinge made of three parts on two axes. That lets all the necessary ribbons pass inside it, and the lid opens to almost 180 degrees without bending or breaking the ribbons inside the hinge. There are problems, though, with wear and with holding the lid against its own weight.

My mechanism (a test one)

At this point work on the hinges is on hold, waiting for the ordered parts. 

In the meantime two more ideas have come up:

1. Build a hinge mechanism with detented positions (open at 160, 110 and 90 degrees), where the lid can only be closed by pressing a release button.
2. Use a classic single-axis hinge but with a ratchet. That means a gear with a smooth tooth profile and a spring pawl that holds it. In that case some force will be needed to close it, and the lid will be held by the pawl. The upside is being able to open the lid and hold it at the angle you want. There are downsides too: the size of the hinges and the mechanism, how well they stand up to wear, and how hard they are to make.