The inevitable keyboard accident happened at Barcamp, although not as badly as I think Tristan Roddis suffered. A few teaspoons of a particularly sugary branded drink ended up under my arrow keys, which meant that pressing up became an unpleasant feedback experience. I should’ve asked people for advice at the time, to be honest: I had to hand a gathering of like-minded, caffeine-addicted typing machines, some or most of whom had probably done the same thing in the past. But it only became an obvious issue after a few days, and so I had to work out myself how to clean the keys.
There’s lots of help out there, but most advice begins with unscrewing the laptop case, something I was unwilling to do owing to its youth. With hindsight I’ve been able to Google a similar suggestion to the method I followed, but at the time I wass just making small, non-destructive steps towards getting rid of the stickiness.
I started by, of course, switching off the laptop and removing the battery. The latter bit may or may not be important, but I was taking no chances. On this keyboard (yours may vary!) I found I could prise the keys off if I pull them either on their top or bottom edge: they have four plastic connections to the base, and removing them this way unclicks two connections at once. Pulling them up from the left or right would put stress on the connections opposite instead, and I’ve had key mountings break before doing that, so be warned. With the plastic head of the key removed, the board reveals the rubbery underlay nipples (say that out loud, I dare you) that each key squashes when it’s pressed down.
With my up-key nipple thus revealed (!) I found some cotton buds and a can of WD40. I sprayed the WD40 at the bud—not at the keyboard, as it can go everywhere—and then rubbed the sticky fizzy drink off the exposed internals with the bud. Two buds to clean and one to dry up the WD40, although WD40 shouldn’t do too much harm in small amounts: I think keyboards ship with a gentle frosting of some specially mixed lubricant anyway, so the WD40 was only replacing that. But still I dried off the nipple, replaced the key gently—again watching out for the four delicate plastic connections under the key—and superstitiously left it all to dry for a minute or two before reconnecting the battery and starting it up.
Now the key works just great. And in one fell swoop I’ve written a post that’s almost guaranteed to get hordes of entirely the wrong sort of visitors to my blog.
