LA-36 DECWriter II Keyboard Assembly

[Rick Bensene]

Hello, all,

I have an otherwise good DECWriter II (LA-36) terminal that has a bad keyboard.  A number of the keyswitches are messed up (the little gold contacts are mangled or the switch assembly itself is damaged), and the nature of the Cherry-made keyboard in this thing is that the keyswitch modules are not individually replaceable.

I'm querying the list to see if anyone out there may have a parts LA-36, or a spare keyboard assembly for same that I can get my hands on.  I'd like to get this thing running again, but with a bad keyboard, even though it all works great (I can test that the keys that are messed up are scanned properly by shorting across the PCB traces and the terminal responds appropriately), it's pretty much useless. 

Somewhere in the life of this machine something HEAVY fell/dropped on the keyboard, and about 1/3rd of the keyswitches ended up getting mangled as well as some of the keycaps.  The only option appears to be to find a replacement for the whole keyboard assembly.

Thanks in advance,

-Rick
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Rick Bensene
The Old Calculator Museum
http://oldcalculatormuseum.com