For my One Month "Just Dü Eettt" I wanted to both teach myself some soldering skills and play around with keyboards. So luck me that I had bought a cheapo keyboard for the sole purpose of soldering on and very possible destroying in the process.
The actual work is half way done now and I have enough to post. So the first half of this is the Spring swapping the switches, adding SIP sockets for LEDs and then finally desoldering all of the current switches and soldering in the new customised switches. unfortunately in my usual style running photography of the process is not one of my strong points so this will mostly be text and a few images (all out of order of course) , there will be an album at the end of all the images not fit to post.
Before I started this I had never really soldered before and I had heard that desoldering was the harder side of the deal. This was very correct, took me forever to get all the switches out of the board. Bits of solder sticking to the pins, solder sucker not quite sucking up all the solder, rookie mistakes and steep learning curves, all of these are things I had to deal with and overcame, sometimes with the help of brüte force. The first problem was that wonderful environmental friendly lead free solder, this just does not even move till you really jack up he heat and annoyingly for solder suckers solidifies really quickly once the heat is off. So the first hour of the actual soldering was half assed and messy, but in the end I got it and I don't think I did too terrible a job of it.
The look pretty clean, A few did stick even after sucking the solder and reflowing it with more solder and trying to suck it out again, just would not work for me. So in that case there were only a few left stuck in so I pried the switch up a bit and hit it with the heat and once the solder melted the switch came free, like I said brute force.
For those trying this themselves, a few tips that helped me though maybe not best practice. Melt the solder on the pin and while keeping the heat on it put the solder sucker over the end of the pin and on the far side from the iron and hit it. Should do it 90% of the time. If a little solder sticks around flow some solder back into the hole again and hold the heat on it to make sure all of it is fluid before sucking it up. Also helpful is to put a little pressure on the the pin and wiggle it just a little once you think it is liquid to make sure as sometime the oxidized skin on the solder will not go shiny, so the wiggle will move it and you will know.
So once all the desoldering was done well it was reverse time. So here is a shot of my soldering.
Good enough for me.
So onward and someway discretionary roundwards to the switches, springs and SIPs.
These were a massive time consuming hole in the day. Coming to think of it I will remedy the missing pictures and details later with some more pictures when part two of this is complete for now HEAR MY WORDS! Opening Gateron switches, which is what i am using in this, is the same as Cherry switches for those who have done or seen that. There are four tabs on the sides of the switch, two on each side, and you have to lift them up in my case with a small flat head, then while holding the switch a little open do the other side. One tab at a time, four per switch, 68 switches and that is only part of what ate up such time. Once you have them all open it looks like this.
After that I installed the SIP sockets and this project being the walk in the park it stared out as was never going to be easy. Nope they came molded in black plastic which you would normally just cut to length and slot the whole line in, well switches are small, too small to fit the plastic molding so every socket had to be cut from the plastic and individually flipped rights side up and pushed through the slightly too small hole in the bottom of the switch. Yup 138 of them but hey the things we do for our hobbies. You can see a strip of them on the left in this next picture along with the bank of switches all with installed SIP sockets and new 100g gold springs, Oh yeah I forgot to mention these are now 100g linear switches, Crazy Right?!
The worrying part was that the pins for the SIP sockets were not long, I think I messed up the order but first time and all, which is really annoying seeing as they were the part that help this entire project up. There is a picture in the album of the little stubby pins and you may or may not have noticed but there was nothing sticking through the holes for the LEDs in the earlier soldering pictures. Yup the legs for the sockets do not make it through the PCB, only barely sitting flush but while part two of this is the LEDs there is at lease one LED on the board all ready, the ever hated CAPS LOCK key, and I can report that even though soldering the ting legs looks horribly ropy I could poke the tip of the iron through the the end f the leg and the solder did take on those little things even though they did not make it through the board. Again picture missing but I will fix that in part two.
So onward from black OutEmu Switches...
...to new custom Clear/Yellow Gateron switches.
That is all for now really, I will have final pictures and many better ones for the next part which is likely to be many hours of frustration as i solder on 1mm X 2mm surface mount resistors and get the light show going.
For now have a terribly light sneak peak of the final board next to my very yellow Filco.
More next time with more explanation as to why I am going these things, Until then ask if you want to know anything.
Oh yeah the Album: https://imgur.com/a/YxFVY And I have typed this all on the board so it is all working still, FuckYeah!
