So, to give you the short version of the story, I spent about 2 or 3 hours today (mixed with a few other things) cleaning up a keyboard for one of my computers. It was a recently purchased Apple A1048 Keyboard which was purchased in a dirty state. I thought, since I had the time today, I’d clean it up before I put out my article for the day, and things went fine until I found out I had gotten water inside the mechanism and a few keys weren’t functioning.
Oops.
Keeping the story short I was able to, with a hell of a lot of patience, disassemble the keyboard down to its core components and clean out the moisture that was causing issues. With an even greater amount of patience I was able to reassemble the keyboard (seriously, it’s an absolute pain to keep things in order) and get things back to how they should be, with a fully functional clean keyboard – well, there is a bit of yellowing on the base but I actually like how that looks.
Yeah, it looks pretty good now. I wouldn’t say this wasn’t worth it, but it was way more difficult and time consuming than it should have been.
So, this kind of took up most of my free time this evening, meaning I couldn’t write what I intended to today. Go figure, right?
This kind of things is the life of a computer hobbyist who’s also a blogger – a conflicting mix of wanting to write about my hobbies while also wanting to indulge in those hobbies. As I have said before, though, I share these things with you, the reader, because they may be of interest to someone curious about the actual day to day digital life of a blogger and tech hobbyist such as myself, as well as it keeping up with my personal goal this month of one article each day.
That all being said, I took some photos as I was working with this keyboard, so I intend on writing an entry about that in the near future since it may prove helpful to someone to know what may be best to avoid in what would otherwise be a trivial endeavor of cleaning an early 2000’s Apple keyboard.