maple "mavica" syrup [6502] @mavica_again@computerfairi.es

friend of mine came pick something up at my home and we greeted each other with a quick fistbump, think that was the most physical contact i've had outside of family in over a year

hey wanna see me make a lot of keyboard nerds mad?

the IBM Model M is a membrane keyboard

almost but not quite all clear. can't figure out how to remove from here the switch for the left shift, which has the retainers for the stabilizer bar, the retainers for the space stabilizers, and the caps lock LED. but this already gives me plenty of surface to clean

the switches are pretty easy to take off by paw once you know where the tabs are

unfortunately (fortunately?) this reveals a lot more rust

oh, the switches come off! accidentally pulled one along with a stubborn keycap, turns out they're held in place by plastic clips holding onto the metal plate

i was right about them being linear spring switches!

this corner isn't so happy

those rubber domes are for the index up and down keys, thankfully they're working fine

i can try to clean up a bit from here but without access to inside the keyboard there's not much i can do about the rust

i WAS going to try to clean the keyboard from the inside to solve stubborn keys, but check out how thick this metal plate is! nothing i have is strong enough to bend them straight to open it

if i had to guess, they are probably linear spring switches (no tactile feel or click)

d'you know what? i'm not immediately seeing any split gears, believe it or not

i think they might be grinding for another reason, like the carriage movement resisting too much

golly!

(the laptop doesn't ever reach dangerous CPU temperatures so i don't really have much of an incentive to do all the work of taking my server down (literally, from a high shelf) and going through the tedious business of replacing a laptop fan, if i even find one for this model)

the tired faulty fan on my home server laptop sometimes sounds not unlike a pot of water very quietly coming to a boil. i stopped and just listened for a minute to all the sounds in the silence of my room and it was pretty relaxing

i won't have much time to work on it today, so maybe this weekend i'll take a look at the gears. those i can get from eBay for a more reasonable price than the pens (because the pens are only sold domestically), but first i'll see if i can do anything to them without replacements

so the next step is to try and focus more on sourcing new pens through whatever process. there's a place you can still buy them in the US but i'm not in the US and that makes it prohibitive, unless someone wants to donate me some pens for cost of shipping

so after more work yesterday and more frustratingly broken pens, it doesn't look too good for restoring the original pens. i still have black and blue working ok, green sputters but looks like the ballpoint is not getting enough ink, and i have no working tips left to make a red