With a couple of aluminium Realforce housing options coming this year, I decided to hunt for a 86U to get that sweet WKL action.
I watched yahoo jp for a while and managed to win an 86U at a pretty good price, but when it arrived, I think I realised why...
Nasty grime and **** everywhere
Significant rust on the plate as well
And on top of that, Backspace, F12, and a few other keys were not registering, even after reseating the domes.
Inspecting the PCB showed that there was some corrosion and white gunk present, possible from a spill from the previous owner
After cleaning it up with some isopropyl alcohol, two pads were shown to be completely corroded away
To get the through-hole pads and traces to connect to each other, I scraped away a small amount of the traces in either direction, and threading a small wire through to solder and complete the connection (thanks to everythat helped me in
this thread)
I was somewhat successful, but I still ended up having to jump one trace, as I found it too difficult to repair the missing pad
Next was the rusted plate.
Sanding all the rust off was fairly time consuming because of how deep some of the rust pitting was in some spots
With the rust gone, I could give the plate a few coats of a silver that I hoped matched the original colour as close as possible
Looks more like a typical aluminium plate now, but still much much better
The caps were cleaned, but then put away in favour of a JIS set and purple sliders (photo from donor board)
All put back together
And now because I only recently was able to get a blue topre stepped caps and brobot set, I switched over to a blank bubblegum pastel theme
Thanks for reading!
Next step is just simply waiting for my WKL norbaforce to grace me with its arrival
