19 Oct
2012
19 Oct
'12
1:41 p.m.
On Oct 19, 2012, at 4:13 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 3:11 PM, David Riley
<fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
Ha, how timely! I actually ended up answering my own question just
a few days ago. If anyone's looking for the answer, it turns out that
Omron's B3F-5000 series is a nearly perfect match. The right-angle
buttons are really just horizontal buttons mounted in a plastic stand
and with the pins on one side bent out; the B3F-5000 matches the
plastic stud pattern on the back perfectly. I just had to bend out
the pins to match the right-angle orientation.
I swapped out the buttons and finally managed to dig the last corroded
metal out of the holes for the battery holder and replaced that just
the other night; now I have a perfectly working Quadra 700 which I had
nearly given up for totally dead a few weeks ago.
I wouldn't actually have cared that much about the buttons except for
the fact that the Q700's ADB controller doesn't have direct lines to
NMI and reset like the later models do, so there's no way to force a
reset or interrupt with the keyboard. All the same, it's nice to
have the machine operating as intended. They're also the "long life"
switch, intended for 10 million actuations, so I should be good for a
while (and at 62.7 cents each on Digi-Key, it made sense to get 10).
- Dave
So does anyone happen to know... what kind of
buttons were used for the
Q700 (also probably the IIci and IIcx, somewhat less unlikely),
or know a good way to find buttons with precise mechanical
dimensions?
I've seen a couple of styles of right-angle pushbuttons, but for the
smaller ones (6mm?), the eject switch of a CD-ROM drive seems to
commonly be of this type. My recollection is that Apple used "fatter"
buttons (8mm? 10mm?) so that might not be a match.