So how did the retrobrite session of my Silicon Graphics mechanical keyboard work out?

My fingers were still aching the next day from all the manual labour of scrubbing each individual key by hand!

After emptying and cleaning out the plastic containers I used I then laid out all of the keys and the keyboard halves to dry out

Whilst this was going on I attempted to give the actual mechnical keyboard mechanisms some attention to get the faulting O key to respond again. Unfortunately I forgot to take any pictures of my work here. However in a nutshell I sprayed the board with a contact cleaner and then worked a curved piece of plastic over the board repeatedly to press down all of the keys multiple times.

But would this be enough? Would some contact cleaner and manual manipulation be adequate or was there a deeper problem which would involve unsoldering the individual keys.

I decided to try my luck and reassemble the keyboard.

Whether or not it would actually fully work, it certainly looked much fresher, cleaner and more consistent in it’s colour.

I went ahead and plugged it into my 386 machine and crossed my fingers

Success! After firing up the PC I was extremely pleased to find the faulty O key was once again working as expected.

I’m imagine I would have been able to get that key working again without such an extensive strip down, however for my first time attempting a retrobrite procedure I was extremely pleased with the result