Although I am seen by some people out there as something special, I am really a neophyte in a lot of ways.
For example, until today, I had never soldered switches in a keyboard! I have had 2 AEKs sitting around, for quite a while, with a few dead switches waiting for repairs. One is beautiful and new-looking, and the other is nauseatingly ugly and yellowed. Naturally, I wanted to salvage the pretty one.
However, I found that it had many bad switches, and dead "areas" of multiple switches. Looking at the back, I could see corrosion and deterioration.
So, on to the other one. I saw 4 bad switches, so I took 4 out of the pretty one and Presto! it worked.
Although it took a while to wrestle the old ones out with my cheap-ass soldering gear, it wasn't really too bad.
Aqua Test showed that they all worked, but then also identified F8 as bad. So, I swapped that one, too.
Unfortunately, probably due to some sort of heavy-handedness on my part, a small section (2mm square) of the printed circuit peeled up at one of the legs. Now, not only was the new F8 dead, but it took out the first half of the number row along with it.
Scheisse + Merde
So, clearly, since I care a lot more about orange Alps switches than I do about Apple keyboards, I suppose that I will harvest what I can from both boards and hold them for a future project, now that there are some juicy ones appearing. And I do have a couple of Dell AT101s that I could transplant them into.
PS - the old AEK was serial number approx 200K and the new one was approx 600K, and the spacebar stabilizers were different and incompatible. I spent some time trying to put the pretty one on until I realized that. everything else seemed almost identical. both boards had the same model numbers and were made in USA.
