All right, so my last episode was about restoring a keyboard,
and this episode is also going to be about restoring a keyboard.
However, there's a very good reason that I'm doing this
and that that will be revealed to you in the next episode.
But for the moment, let's go ahead and enjoy this keyboard restoration project.
So, I picked up these two keyboards and mouse at a local thrift shop for a few bucks.
As you can see, the colors faded and they're pretty disgusting.
I think they're in need of some of my special care.
I started with the mouse. The first thing it was going to need was some alcohol.
You can see how disgusting this cable was, but with some work, it did clean up.
Next I worked on cleaning the body of the mouse.
It cleaned up pretty well on the outside. I took the ball out of the mouse and begin to clean it with alcohol.
It cleaned up nicely as well.
Okay. At this point, I needed to disassemble the mouse.
This type only has four screws, and it comes apart very easily.
This made it much easier to clean the areas between the top and bottom sections of the mouse.
And I also gave the rest of it a good rinse in the sink.
Next it was time to move to the Retrobright.
I decided to use the "Cling Wrap Method" on this one.
Here's how that works:
Just cut out a piece of cling wrap and pour in some of the salon cream, which is basically hydrogen peroxide.
Make sure that you get all of the surfaces covered in the stuff, then just wrap it up like this.
We'll come back to this later.
So I moved on to the keyboard.
This particular keyboard is somewhat rare.
They're hard to find and not cheap when you do find them.
This was the original keyboard that came with the Apple IIGS.
I started cleaning the outside up with alcohol.
This stuff appeared to be leftover adhesive from tape or some kind of label.
Fortunately, the alcohol removed it.
I moved on to the next step, which means popping off all of the keys.
And you can see the nightmare that was waiting under these keys.
So, the next thing I did was to get out the vacuum cleaner and
suck up as much of that nasty stuff as possible.
You can see a massive improvement already.
Next, I removed the three screws on the bottom to further disassemble the keyboard.
As usual, I gave the keys a good soaking and then I cleaned each key, one at a time.
You can see the keys look much cleaner, but they're still yellowed,
so they needed the peroxide treatment as well.
I used the same "Cling Wrap Method" as I did for the mouse.
I tried to work out all of the creases out of the cling wrap so the UV light would be applied evenly.
Then I left it out on the sun for a few hours, while periodically spreading the cream around.
Then it was time to pull the cling wrap off and rinse the cream away.
Here's the finished pieces.
But I wasn't done yet, I still needed to do the keys.
I decided to use the cling wrap on them instead of submerging them with the peroxide.
The main issue is submerging them is that they form bubbles and rise at the top and it's a
nuisance having to re-submerge them every 10 minutes.
So, this method seemed to work pretty well.
Once some of the keys were done, I started to reassemble the keyboard.
Just for reference, here's one of the keys I have not yet treated.
And my daughter helped put on the last remaining keys.
So, here's what it looked like before,
and here's the finished product.
Let's look at the mouse before,
and now after. Oh, and remember this keyboard?
I restored it, too. Here's the finished product.
Alright well, I hope you enjoyed that. I've actually been doing a lot of keyboard restoration projects, for example,
I just restored this Apple blueberry keyboard.
I didn't bother to make a video about it though because I don't want to bore you with like a hundred different keyboard restoration videos,
but I do have a really interesting episode coming up about Apple keyboards.
You'll see them two to three weeks,
and that's why I've been doing all this and I think you're going to really like it.
Then, after that I'm actually planning on doing something interesting with this Raspberry Pi.
I'm thinking I need to figure out a way to retrofit it inside of something like maybe I'm thinking,
an old compact Macintosh or maybe a Commodore 64 or something like that.
I don't know. We'll see I'm going to find some real interesting to put this inside of.
I'll see you next time!