26 Dec
2008
26 Dec
'08
3:33 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
As I mentioned, it is possible to take the swtiches
apart and clean the
contacts and/or coat them in a bit of pencil graphite. But how long it'll
last I don't know. I did it to mine, they're still working _but_ I put
them in places where I'd not really use them (I rarely use numeric
keypads, so I put the bodged switches there). You;'ve got far too many
duds to do that, though.
This is an old thread - March of this year. It was about a TRS-80 Model
4 with a really bad keyboard. Only a handful of keys had any sort of
life in them.
I now have a replacement keyboard for the machine that is significantly
better. I was able to cleanly desolder a dead keyswitch and disassemble
it to examine it. The keyswitch mechanism is exactly as you described -
a rubber dome with a conductive pad in the middle.
The question now is about the conductive pad. Cleaning with rubbing
alcohol has not helped anything. Is there anything besides pencil
graphite that will work to lower the resistance? I'm looking for
something that will last a while, and your concerns about the pencil
graphite have me concerned too. I'm not going to desolder and repair
every keyswitch so I won't be able to move dodgy ones to the keypad to
avoid using them. I'd rather take a little more time and find a better
solution ..
If I press hard enough on the bad switch eventually the resistance will
come down from infinity to around 6000 Ohms. A good keyswitch shows
under 100 Ohms of resistance.
A picture of the insides of the keyswitch (including the rubber dome
contact I'm trying to rejuvenate) can be found here:
http://www.brutman.com/TRS80_Model_4_Keyswitch.jpg
Thanks,
Mike
