Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, my fellow crawlbots…

Hello and welcome to the Starseeker GiftShop! Here you will find … only one gift, namely the Model I (short form for Model Inoad). Its a modification of the very populat Model M Keyboard for my friend inoad. Its her favorite keyboard, so I thought, how I could modify it for her to like it.

take a look at the original one firstI decided to make it Black/Red, (the keys, that have a bit darker grey should be red (with some excludes)), bought red and black color spray, made for plastic and some plastic primer, to make the spray stick better on the glossy keys.

The first thing I did was cleaning the key caps. This is important, ’cause here the most dirt waits, to give the color a hard time. I put all the key caps into a “bowl” and applied a special “you-dont-want-to-know-whats-inside”-cleaner on them…

Thats me, holding the bowl of key caps… (yeah… with my feet. I needed those hands to make that photo).Then I mixed (watch MaBUs whirly-curly video) the cleaner with water and extracted the REALLY dirty part. I also double checked, that they were really clean. That was really important, because the keyboard was in use in my fathers school since its production date in mid 1987. Thousands of students mistreted it and its still alive! Well-designed huh?

mix …
… sicken …
… vomit …After cleaning them from the worst dirt (and washing my own hands, cause they were full of dirt, too), I double checked them again…

… and i came really close After that, I dried all the key caps on the floor. They had enough time to say goodbye to their old look.

and look how nicely they’re all sorted I had strong help. Michael, a friend, came by and helped. He was holding the keyboard, so that I could take a picture (actually he was hiding behind it… but thats another story).

he’s a bit shy on photosAfter cleaning the caps, I started opening the keyboard. Until now, everything was unsure… if the color would really stick on the pastic, if i could open the keyboard, if all parts were easy enough for me to disassemble (and reassemble) them, if the red diods could be inserted… all that was unsure… but I tried my best.

What am I without the right tool in my hands? Nothing. So I searched the right tool… (a really scary uncommon 5mm 6-edge socket wrench) but couldn’t find it. So I used my fine metal rasp and tortured my needle-nosed pliers to be thin enough to fit into the screw holes of the keyboard.

Thats the long haired me at the file…
… really busy. (thanks to Michael for making these Photos)After opening the Keyboard under hazardous conditions… I was faced by the glory of an 18 year old keyboard’s internals and everything seemed well.

Even exchanging the leds on the led panel seemed to be managableSo I disassembled the keyboard body parts, cleaned them and hung them to dry.

Yeah! Senior keyboard body surfing the clothesline!After doing that, having a coffee for wait and lining up all the keys on small paperboards I applied the plastic preconditioner to the keyboard body and the keycaps. This stuff is REALLY sticky… i had to take care, not to glue all the keys onto the paper surface. That had been really bad, because the paper had soaked all the water out of the color, which had resulted in an unequal colored surface.

Watch them dry in small groups…
… or as a perfect coupleAfter another 20 minutes of waiting for the preconditioner to dry… they all waited until they were black… (german phrase)

Watch nearly the whole family reunitedThen there happened some very generic things like sleeping and waiting…
The other day, I colored all the other keycaps red and black, corrected some errors and went on to the most tricky part… changing the diods.

I’ll entertain you with some pictures first.

Thats the diode PCB… small, simple and normally glued onto the main plate of the keyboard.
‘Your best friend: The third hand’ – exchanging the diods WITHOUT burning myself (really uncommon, cause i seen not to be scared that much about the heat on the solder).
Thats the diode PCB again… can you tell what changed?! Yes! Right! The perspective is different!There are two videos of me, testing the bare electronics of the keyboard (one and two). I was so relieved, when i noticed, that all 3 LEDs were lighting red after all.

Then, I cleanded the main plate of the keyboard and branded the internals for my “sister” inoad

There is some writing on that metal, but you might not be able to figure, so:

IBM Model M
Produced 21.9.1987 07:06 PM
Modification 17.7.2005
by Joel Garske
For his Sister Inoad
new name: Model I

While I was changing the diods and cleaning the main plate, all the parts went dry enough to be reassembled step by step.

The new mainplate with nearly all key caps set up
The new body with nearly all key caps in it.I had to totally recreate the main “return”-key, so its still missing on that pictures… its still driing. While it was, I made a journey to finally find the mysterious uncommon scary and even impossible to find 5mm 6-edge socket wrench. I was in nearly every shop in this town that sold things made of metal. I didn’t want to torture the freshly coloured Keyboard body with that filed needle-nosed pliers, but there wasn’t any other possibility.

After breaking my fingers while reassembling the electronics and mountign the screws as carefully as possible, the whole thing, WITH the missing “return” key and the “Short Haired Me” looked like this:

Look at my smiling comfortable and pleased face Thats for you Inoad … may you have good luck, coding with this (sadly very sensitive) keyboard!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 at 00:21 and is filed under Dinge die geschehen, Persoenlich, Technotrends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.