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A guy at the scrapyard showed me how to check switch springs with a guitar pick
I was digging through a pile of old terminals at a scrapyard outside Tulsa last month, pulling out keyboards with Cherry MX clones. A older fellow sorting copper wire nearby saw me yanking on a keycap and came over. He pulls a guitar pick out of his pocket, slides it under the keycap to pop it clean off without bending the stem, then taps the switch a few times. He said "you can hear a bad spring just by the rattle, saves you from pulling the whole board apart." I tried it on a handful of switches from a dusty Packard Bell board and sure enough, three of them had that tinny sound he described. Now I keep a blue pick in my tool bag specifically for quick switch checks. Anyone else got a weird tool they use for keyboard stuff that most people wouldn't think of?
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margaret_singh128d ago
Hey I feel you on that one @sam_anderson but honestly it's one of those things that just works. The pick trick is dead simple once you try it.
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