Keyboard washing

Written by Jørn"Brotulix" Holm
Published 20 December 2001

Keyboards are coke-victims, or coffee, or whatever you don't want to spill on them. The point is - they get filthy, and you probably hate cleaning them with q-tips and white spirit? I do, and I thought that I should give the dishwasher a try.

The "volunteer" was a semi-dead keyboard like this

A black keytronic keyboard I got from a friend of mine earlier that week. I did this to another keyboard as well, a white one.

How to open a Keytronic keyboard

So - what I did was that I used a flat screwdriver to pry open the keyboard. You have to be -careful- with these sods! Trial and error taught me. Start like this

Then carefully push the front of the keyboard downwards (take a look on the holes on the bottom rear side and experiment) Then pick out all the keys so that they make a pretty pile ;) This will let you take of the next 'layer', etc etc etc... (hey, not all of us have got keytronic keyboards!?)

Washing

Well, the general idea is to leave the keyboard in pieces - like this

Now leave the electronics out, and stuff the rest into the dishwasher - like this

If your keyboard has a PBC full of switches (like those old IBM keyboards on the pic below) you might want to consider either a) letting it dry for "a week", or b) not washing it at all.

Run the dishwasher on a mild wash, let it all dry for some hours (you can most likely see when it's dry enough yourself, right?), and stick it all back together the way it was before. Hopefully, you will now have a clean and functional keyboard, just like me ;)

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