I've started this mod maily because the keyboard was in bad shape and I didn't want to throw it out. Some of you may recall that I already wrote about this keyboard in a different topic.
The idea was to swap switches for Cherry MX Blue and along the way swap LEDs as well. I'm thinking orange or yellow LEDs for this one. I'm counting on another GH member to provide the switches while the LEDs will have to come from eBay.
As sixty said, TG3 really has nice and clean soldering. It did however take some practice as I haven't done this before. For anyone interested, I set the soldering iron to 350C. Probably too high so I'll try 300 later on. So far I managed to desolder about 24 switches and diodes which took me a good 3 hours. I'm thinking I'll need about 7 hours for the whole board.
Will report back on my progress :) Stay tuned!
January 7th: removed all but 14 switches now. I'm planning to finish tomorrow morning. Shouldn't take more than an hour :)
January 8th: desoldered all switches and removed the metal plate. Cleaned both sides of the PCB as well as the metal plate. Some of the top-side solder pads are corroded because of the gunk that got under the switches. Hope this doesn't affect anything.
Awaiting switches and LEDs. Hopefully I can finish the mod by the end of the week. I can't wait! :)
January 19th: Installed and soldered the MX Blue switches. Took me less than an hour. Awaiting LEDs :)
March 7th: Yeah, it took me this long to get replacement LEDs and install them. Here's the result!
p.s. The left side is actually not the exact same keyboard ;)
The project is now finished. It took me about 14-15 hours to complete. I'm pretty sure I could do another in less than 10 hours.