Board Surgery

Over the weekend I had to perform repair surgery on my white Alps64 board. After giving a tour of my office, my metal ErgoDox mockup fell off its wall mount, hitting the Alps64 on the way down. 

Fortunately there wasn’t too much damage other than the left-bracket keycap being broken off.

As is commonly seen with Alps switches, the keycap stem was broken off and stuck lodged in the slider. 

I removed all the necessary keycaps from the board to expose the case screws, and removed the PCB from the case. Fortunately I like to keep many spare parts in stock, including white alps SKCM switches. 

I soldered on a new switch and verified it worked.  I also went through my parts and tracked down a left-bracket keycap from an AEKI. Unfortunately it doesn’t match the AEKII keycap perfectly. The dyesub printing is slightly different(more purple than black), and the replacement keycap sits half a millimeter taller than the AEKII caps. 

Things could have been worse, but the board still looks pretty and is in good shape. Hopefully there will be no more infighting among my boards in the future. 

Typed on Access-IS Matrix Keyboard