On Wed, 7 Jan 2009, Josh Dersch wrote:
Yet another small repair question --
Picked up an Osborne 1 with a non-functional keyboard. Upon opening it, I
found that one of the plastic/membrane keyboard ribbon connectors had cracked
partially through near where it plugs into the PCB.
Since these ribbons are actually part of the membrane of the keyboard I can't
just replace the cracked ribbon -- so the only option appears to be to re-cut
the end of the ribbon cable and expose a bit of the conductive material.
What's the recommended means to expose the conductive stripes at the end?
I've tried gently scraping with the tip of an x-acto knife but it either does
nothing or takes everything off the end :).
Are you sure the ribbon is actually a "sandwich"? My Tandy CoCos and
Atari 800XL units have a similar flex ribbon where the conductors are on
the top surface. I've been able to simply cut them back and reinsert the
remainder. (I initially went down the same path and tried scraping them -
with similar results <g>).
Steve
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