Kinesis surgery

Today I had to perform surgery on my beloved Kinesis. Fourteen keys did not make the trip from San Francisco to Boston: 3, 4, 5, ., p, y, e, u, i, j, k, x, left arrow, and right arrow. Fortunately, mongo had run into this problem before and sent me instructions he'd received from Kinesis to fix the problem.

First, borrowed a phillips head from ichthyos. Only at MIT would you hear, upon telling him why I needed to borrow a screwdriver, "I happen to have a Kinesis I'm not using that you could borrow, if you can't get your keyboard to work. Just don't rearrange the keys."

Phillips head acquired. I opened up the keyboard and it was disgusting inside. Mental note: clean the keyboard periodically.



I was having problems with the left keywell, so the instructions told me to unscrew it and disconnect it from the central main circuit board at the white connector. You can see even in the photo that it's slightly skewed; the lock for the connector was partially unlocked and the lower portion of the keywell tail (coincidently, corresponding to the dead keys) didn't seem to be securely connected.



After pulling out the left keywell (which I didn't think to take a photo of :(), I reconnected it back to the main circuit board and re-locked it back in place. It looked way better than it had before I took it apart. It also looked way better than the right keywell. Even though all of the right keys worked, I ripped out the right keywell and reconnected it anyway, just for good measure.

Finally put the keyboard back together; the hardest part was not stripping the screws, which Kinesis is evidently aware of because they explicitly point it out when putting the keyboard back together. Verdict? Success! All keys functional.