deskthority

It's 13:30 in the morning, My bell rings. Who dares to wakes up a hard working student from his well earned 14h a day sleep? Oh, it's the mail man. He brings this very heavy package from Electronics Plus. What could it be?

Taadaa:
A 107-Key Model F
This was my price I won at the DTA 2014 voting, sponsored by Electronics Plus, or probably better, DTA 2014 winner Cindy. I couldn't really decide on a keyboard till Christmas, then the 31c3 happend, the shipping took quite some time and finally german customs needed quite some time to figure out that I don't have to pay any tariffs, but now it's finally here.

The case of that thing is completely made of metal. When it arrived it was about 0°C, and they key on the border where clamping to the case, guess this temperature out of the spec.

If you thought your Model M was heavy, thing again. I don't have a scale here, but it's said to be about 6kg/12lbs. It's by far the heavies keyboard i ever saw.

Well, the first thing I did was to open it: To my surprise, it has metric skews. Maybe in 1983 IBM still hoped that one day the US might make the switch that it hasn't made yet. You can see some corrosion in the backside of the board, but that a way more harmless then it looks like in the picture.

Apparently it was repaired at some point, I can't figure out what was been done. I guess as of today nobody would repair a keyboard anymore.

This is the board:
The board itself makes up a significant portion of the weight.
The board looks dirty, so I'll disassemble and clean it.

The "board" itself is a sandwich of a sheet, the pcb, the barrels with the springs, foam and another sheet. After beding back one cramp, the upper and lower sheet can be slides against one another and the sandwich opens.

The cramp that prevents the sliding in lock position: (picture made at the end, herence the white color). The two parts: I expected the foam around the barrels to disintegrate completely, but it was in a surprisingly good condition. What a luck, because replacing that would have meant I'd had to punch more than 107 hole in a piece a foam, at the right position, I wasn't looking forward that.

Remove the foam from the upper sheet: And loose lot's springs. If you ever do the same, keep your workspace cleaner than I do, finding these once they are lost is quite tricky.

Now it's time to clean the thing, the reason why I disassembled it.
As You can see in the water, it was very, very dirty. However, the most ugly parts wheren't dirt. On the left part you can see how it looked like "clean", the right part, under water was much worse. This plaque was corroded metal, and I couldn't remove it without tools. This looks a way more harmless on the photo than in reality. So I sandpapered it.
All the silver sports are now bar metal, and previously had rust on them. In order to avoid further rusting, I spray painted it. I thought I lost a spring during the whole thing. Model M springs can be bought individually for very little money, but Model F springs are apparently hardly available. So, if you do this, pay more attention then i did. Because I didn't knew what what to do i left the place where i could place the roll-lock key empty. (Do you see my mistake? I didn't). Here it is:
Well, so much of the lost spring. I was very lucky to "find" it in such a odd space.

Here another picture of the sliding mechanism: Ok, I have two more pictures, Looks like I have to make another post for that.

There is one of a spring that behaved oddly: And the Keyboard in it's whole beauty: By the way: The keycaps have very sharp edges.

Future work:
Wait for XWhatsit usb-controller and actually use it. The keys have a fantastic feeling, I'm really looking forward to it.
I also consider powder coating it. So far i consider white, black, A white top and a black bottom, grey or bight red. But the original color is nice, too, so I will not hurry.

And again, I'd like to thank the sponsor: http://www.elecshopper.com/

great work so far! The A 107-Key Model F is obviously in good caring hands! Yeah loosing something small like that has happened to me too.

Yes that sliding mechanism is the same on my 3104. I had to use the hammer on mine to seperate the plates!

Nice work looking good. Is that a x61s i spy in the back of the frame? this man knows a good laptop as well as a good keyboard

EDIT

If you do ever need a model f spring i do have some spares left ( not too many left now tho need another junk XT to steal caps and springs from )

Really nice Miko!
@seebart, he didn't loose it, he put it in the second spacebar position!
And that is worse! Looking for the bloody thing all over and later realize it was there all along!

@seebart: Fortunalty I found it again. Look at the spoiler.

@andrewjoy: Thanks a lot. But so far I'm good. No, unfortunalty that's just a x220, probably the latest model that at least resembles a proper thinkpad.

/edit

And yeah, the sliding requires a whole lot of force. I just a block of wood and a screwdriver as a crank.

chzel wrote: Really nice Miko!
@seebart, he didn't loose it, he put it in the second spacebar position!
And that is worse! Looking for the bloody thing all over and later realize it was there all along!

ok well at least it's not gone then!

I found a spring from my Fujitsu Peerless recently while vacuming that I lost over two months ago!

Great looking board. I think you also need a congratulations on getting a Model F with decent foam, too!

I have taken my F107 apart and put it back together probably 7 or 8 times now, and I have wound up putting a spring/flipper into the spacebar and backspace barrels multiple times. Incredibly annoying.

Excellent, looks like it found a great home! If you mod it to ansi or iso, you'll get another spring back

I don't think leaving that flippy with the spring will cause any issues as there are no pads there, but it might change some capacitance values if there's a trace running beneath it or something. Don't recall where the barrel was exactly located in respect to the pcb..

Very nice pictures. These are really nice boards. I'm actually typing this post on one I converted to ANSI. (finished it last night). I look forward to seeing yours done (especially if you powder coat it. Crazy your foam was in good shape. Maybe it was replaced at some point? I almost did the same thing with a spare spring in the bottom row but figured it out once i took a closer look. I was also lucky enough to only have to open it once. At any rate what an amazing prize. These definitely don't grow on trees.

Na, the spacebar behaves funny, so I fixed it later. So far I don't have the controller so I can't test that. I'm just surprised that a tiny piece of plastic on, not even in between, such a tiny capacitor is even measurable. As a short napkin calculation gives below 10^-12 farats, that's incredibly small. Maybe this fragile circuit could be irritated by this.

Did you take into account that the plastic has material embedded in it to help with capacitance - a bit similar to a finger really, as any model F bare pcb can be tested by thumbing the pads instead of placing a flippy on them

The pcb is also 0.8mm and not 1.6.

Nice board there! Have you ordered controller already? I might have one or two extra waiting boards. But i think itse not going to happen soon.

Yeah, I ordered a controller. The weak euro really comes at at great time.