The caps are almost all shined. Well, at least this thing has been put to good use!
The lighting around my desk likes to make anything that isn't pure white look beige.
A battle scar from its many years in office
It seems that the cable with a right-angled connector has the complaint of being too short. This one is almost too long.
It also looks like the Datapoint logo could come off to reveal the Acer logo beneath it, but I think I'm going to keep it on. Honor the history of this one.
The ANSI bigshots:
Love 'em
The DC-3014 has Dell AT101 PBT caps on it (and my AT101 has DC-3014 caps on it, naturally)
So I just recently got this Acer KB101A rebrand off eBay; it's one of the last keyboards I've needed to complete my blue Alps most-wanted list. I've got them all, for the most part, now!
Does anyone know how to brighten up the indicator film? Retrobright does NOTHING to it.
So, here's the board as it was in the beginning:
These are from the eBay listing. Thanks to restoring keyboards all week and last week too, I was getting a bit sick of photodocumentation by the end of things, haha.
The top image shows the cleaned plate, brightened case, and lubed stabs. I also tightened and cleaned the cable's coils. They were a wee bit stretched as I received it. It surely didn't help that the seller wrapped the cable around the board when he packed it, haha. Can't fault him though as he was clearly not an enthusiast. I love that this board saw so much use in an office. I love keyboards with a past.
Never seen a KB101A rebrand like this before, aside from XMIT's Alps SKCM White Texas Instruments-branded KB101A.
That one is very interesting in and of its own right.
As for the Datapoint: As you can see, it's not so bad. Retrobrighting still took a day though.
Label on the back. Glad I took a picture of this, because cleaning the board washed off the white pigment of this label and trying to shield it from water only made it worse as the adhesive of the tape really removed it. I should've done what I had done with the Xerox boards at first, and created a non-adhesive bit to go over the label and only leave the adhesion on the plastic. Ahh, NBD.
I really should've taken a picture of the plate. It was disgustingly grimy. Not gritty, just caked on grime; sticky. I used a bunch of elbow grease, and old toothbrush, and 99% isopropanol to clean the plate squeaky.
For a while, the clicks on the blues died. Alarmed, I came to realize that it was the alcohol seeping into the housings and wetting the leaves. A hair drier made quick work of that and they're all just peachy again. Non-clicky blues feel a lot like SKCM Orange.
There was a sunflower seed on the plate, what looked like christmas sparkle glitter (it's what looks like an LED in one of the eBay pictures, shining through the gaps in the keys), and small styrofoam pellets. Not much of any of these, but damn did this board see some fun times.
Can't use it just yet.
This little thing seems to have always been this odd beige color.
Retrobrighting:
Love this thing.
Immersion takes a much longer time, but is safer for caps as they are prone to bleaching and streaking.
UV!
