Good afternoon —
I recently came into possession of the IBM Model F keyboard that came with my Dad’s IBM AT that he purchased back in 1984, and I’m hoping to bring the keyboard back into service in some way. The inner foam has, as expected, disintegrated into a fine powder, and due to having been stored in a humid basement for something approaching 30 years, the top plate has corroded to the point where it’s no longer black, it’s actually completely white on the top instead, and the foam residue on the inside of it has left behind a rather disgusting, sticky, flaky mess that seems like it might be more trouble to clean up than to try to rescue.
I saw that you have a foam insert that, after a little trimming with some scissors, will work with an AT-layout Model F (the F107 layout, if memory serves), but when I look at the repair kits available, it seems that there are kits for every Model F except that layout. Is there a way to obtain a repair kit that has the correct foam insert for this layout?
I’m also hoping that you might be able to provide (or know how to source) a top plate for the same layout, since I’m not sure that I can strip the top plate of all of the corrosion and re-paint it without it winding up worse.
Any hints or advice would be very welcome.
Thank you!
~~ Matt Balmer
After some effort, the vast majority of the mineral deposits have been removed from the keyboard plate. I took a couple of the springs and dropped them in some distilled water, and sure enough, after about six hours, the deposits had dissolved into the water, and they were nicely clean after allowing them to air dry over the course of a couple of days. Since that seemed to work, I took the remainder of the springs, and soaked them in a distilled water bath, and they came out nicely. Here’s pictures of the ones that went through the bath first.
The source of it all was definitely being exposed to really hard water — I also got my hands on an old Sun Sparcstation 1 that was stored in the same area, and it had the exact same kind of damage. It was clear that water had dripped down onto it and worked its way inside; the same white crusty junk was all over the inside of the case. It had even managed to crawl its way up into one of the drives’ spindle motors and had completely ruined it.
As I understand it, the keyboard PCB is capacitive, so if it’s plugged in to a device, I should be able to just tap the keypads with a keyboard flap to get signals out of them.
I also have an M122 that I’m working on that uses the 3179 terminal keyboard layout. I’d like to re-legend it for regular use and switch it to an ANSI layout if possible. Are the keys you sell the kind that are just the cap, or the full cap and stem? The keys I currently have are the kind where you could pop the cap off to re-legend it without having to pull the whole key stem out.