So, I found this old Apple A1048 keyboard and a pile of old junk in a storage closet at work.
It was in horrible shape and I was going to throw it away,
but then I decided to give it a second life and restore it.
As you can see it's pretty nasty. Not only dirty, but the keys have yellowed from exposure to heat or UV light.
To do a full restoration, I'm going to need to remove all of the keys. On this particular model,
there are no tricks to removing the keys you can just pretty much pry them off.
As, I'm taking them up, you can see some of the crud under the keys and hence why it's necessary to remove them.
In fact you can see all kinds of nastiness inside the keys themselves.
OK. I'll need to remove these metal parts from the larger keys. I'll clean those up later.
Next, I'll put all of the keys in a bowl with some soap and water. I'll let them soak for about 10 minutes.
Next, I'll rinse them off and begin the process of cleaning each individual key, it's important to get all six sides of each key.
OK. Even once the keys are cleaned, they're still yellow, so we'll come back to that later.
OK. I used the vacuum cleaner to suck up as much dirt and hair as possible.
Then I followed that up with some compressed air to see how much more I can remove.
Next I had to find a 0.50 Hex wrench, which are a bit hard to find.
Then we begin the process of disassembling the keyboard.
There are three of these Hex screws on the bottom of the keyboard.
So the next thing was to unplug these two ribbon cables. There's no trick, they just pull straight out.
Next, I unscrew these two Phillips screws so that I could remove this little decorative bezel.
It's yellow and it needs to be restored like the keys. I'll get back to that later.
There were a few more screws, and then I could remove the rest of the keyboard for cleaning.
Cleaning this part is pretty simple, I just use some Windex and a paper towel.
Pretty much the same thing on this part too. Now, this part was a tough decision.
Despite the vacuum and compressed air you can see it was still pretty yucky.
Ideally, I could take the keyboard further apart and blast this with water from the garden hose. That would probably take
20 or 30 minutes. I decided to attempt to just clean in between the contacts using paper towels and Q-tips.
It actually worked out to be faster as I got it pretty clean in about 10 minutes.
You can clearly see where I've cleaned on the right side
And now you can see the whole thing clean.
So, I used some denatured alcohol on the USB cable.
And you can see that cleaned up pretty well!
EEW!
I filled a container with 3% hydrogen peroxide and submerged all of the keys.
This actually took a little while to get all the air bubbles out of the keys so that they would sink.
Then I placed them under a blacklight.
Normally the sun works a lot faster, but it's been overcast and raining outside all week. Well, after three days
I could see the keys had made some progress, but it was going to take weeks at this rate to finish.
Eventually the sun came out, so I was able to accelerate this process a lot.
Here's the result after just two hours in direct sunlight.
For collectibles, it's always best to wind the chords in a circle so that the cable doesn't develop permanent kinks.
I also restored the mouse that I found with this keyboard, but that's a video for another day.