Omnikey 101

User avatar
dotdash

21 Jan 2022, 21:27

I'm mostly a bucking spring guy, but I recently obtained my first Alps board, a Northgate Omnikey 101.
I stumbled across the listing, and saw that it had probably been serving time at my Alma Mater at the same time I was, before being bought surplus by the fellow who was now selling it. I managed to get it for under my limit of a cnote, with shipping and tax. Tax, on a 30 year old keyboard? C'mon ebay. I went over slightly when I found I no longer had my stash of AT>ps/2 converters, or a m-m switchbox cable, and had to order a m-m ps/2 cable. Don't you hate it when you throw something out, and end up needing it ten years later? It's in pretty good condition. The E, R, T, D, and G keys are strangely more yellowed than the rest, and the print screen key only works every other keypress. The feel is nice, but a bit scratchy, especially when the keys aren't hit straight on.
I've pulled a few caps, and there's rust on the plate in spots. I've heard anecdotes about destroying the switches by pulling keycaps, so it makes me a bit nervous everything I yank one. I'll probably just try and clean it up, and might dig into the print screen switch to see if it will function properly after opening it up and cleaning it.
Keyboard with detachable AT cable
Keyboard with detachable AT cable
omni101.jpg (2.18 MiB) Viewed 6640 times
Damn lazy switch
Damn lazy switch
101printscreen.jpg (2.8 MiB) Viewed 6640 times

User avatar
fohat
Elder Messenger

21 Jan 2022, 22:13

Great keyboard, and worth the time, effort, and money to bring it up to A+ condition.

User avatar
Polecat

22 Jan 2022, 20:22

dotdash wrote:
21 Jan 2022, 21:27
I'm mostly a bucking spring guy, but I recently obtained my first Alps board, a Northgate Omnikey 101.
I stumbled across the listing, and saw that it had probably been serving time at my Alma Mater at the same time I was, before being bought surplus by the fellow who was now selling it. I managed to get it for under my limit of a cnote, with shipping and tax. Tax, on a 30 year old keyboard? C'mon ebay. I went over slightly when I found I no longer had my stash of AT>ps/2 converters, or a m-m switchbox cable, and had to order a m-m ps/2 cable. Don't you hate it when you throw something out, and end up needing it ten years later? It's in pretty good condition. The E, R, T, D, and G keys are strangely more yellowed than the rest, and the print screen key only works every other keypress. The feel is nice, but a bit scratchy, especially when the keys aren't hit straight on.
I've pulled a few caps, and there's rust on the plate in spots. I've heard anecdotes about destroying the switches by pulling keycaps, so it makes me a bit nervous everything I yank one. I'll probably just try and clean it up, and might dig into the print screen switch to see if it will function properly after opening it up and cleaning it.omni101.jpg
101printscreen.jpg
The print screen thing is on purpose, built into Northgate's firmware. Back in the DOS days if you hit that key by accident it could take several minutes to do a screen dump to a dot matrix or daisy wheel printer and hang you up in the mean time while it was printing (and using up your ribbon and paper), so Northgate made it so you had to press it twice. Later OS versions went to Shift-PrintScreen for the same reason.

Very common to get the uneven yellowing on the Northgates.

edited for a couple typos

User avatar
hellothere

22 Jan 2022, 21:29

As a person that's worked on at least a dozen OmniKeys, but no 101s, I'll mention...

* These are nice keyboards. Sound great and look pretty OK.
* I strongly doubt that that's the only bit of rust you'll find :D.
* You can use retr0bright on the white keys and get great results. I use the cream peroxide + OxyClean + sun version. You can toss the keys in retr0bright and just stir the mixture every hour or two. How long it'll take depends on what your weather is like.
* The grey key caps look great in this pic. If you do decide to retr0bright, you need to check the key caps often. They can become really bleached really quick.

Polecat is the expert on all things OmniKey.

User avatar
dotdash

24 Jan 2022, 19:41

Polecat wrote:
22 Jan 2022, 20:22
The print screen thing is on purpose, built into Northgate's firmware.
Ah, thanks for the information. I should have caught that, as I found a copy of the manual. I was concentrating on the dip switches, as the PO mentioned he used it in Dvorak mode. The dip switches were all default when I got it however.

Yes, hellothere, that's the worst spot, but there is more rust on the plate. Removing the plate seems daunting- they even soldered over the screws on the backside. Maybe careful sanding of the rusty areas?

User avatar
Polecat

25 Jan 2022, 05:32

The soldered screws are easier to remove than you would expect. I've done that by carving away the solder from the phillips slots, with a sharp tool like an awl, enough to get a good fit with a screwdriver, and just unscrewing them. No heat needed. The solder is soft, and carves and breaks loose easily.

User avatar
hellothere

25 Jan 2022, 20:02

dotdash wrote:
24 Jan 2022, 19:41
Yes, hellothere, that's the worst spot, but there is more rust on the plate. Removing the plate seems daunting- they even soldered over the screws on the backside. Maybe careful sanding of the rusty areas?
While I have a desoldering iron -- and it's supposed to be one of the better ones -- I've been mainly desoldering with my regular soldering iron and a Soldapullt. I can do an entire motherboard in about two hours or so. I rest a lot, too, and I'm old.

I would definitely not be accurate enough to sand parts of a plate with keys still attached, not to mention that I'd get debris in all of the key switches.

If you have rust that hasn't pitted the surface, you may just want to use Evaporust or similar and repaint with something that's rust-resistant. I rather like black semi-gloss Rust-Oleum with primer, because it kind of sparkles in the light. If it's pitted, a wire brush cup works extremely well for me. Of course, you'd also need a drill or you now have an excuse to get a sandblasting kit. You still need to paint or you'd just get rust again.

One other thing: if you are going to paint the mounting plate, don't slather on 15 coats or anything. You won't be able to get the switches to fit back into the holes.

User avatar
dotdash

26 Jan 2022, 23:55

Update: making it worse with the best intentions.
I pulled the remaining keycaps so I could clean them, then decided to tackle the backplate. Two of the screws had enough of the head exposed to simply torque off. The remaining three were tougher, with the bottom two having the heads completely covered. I tried a few things, then eventually resorted to pressing a hot soldering iron to the head until I could get enough exposed to get a screwdriver in. After getting all the backplate screws loose, I decided to test the board again. The M key was stuck, and the backspace no longer worked. I don't know if this happened from pulling caps, or from removing the backplate. I took both switches apart and re-assembled them. Now the M key seems to be working properly, but still no backspace.

User avatar
dotdash

07 Feb 2022, 16:03

Small update.
I've been busy with other things, but did some testing on the backspace key. While the switch doesn't want to work, I can get it to register by opening the switch and pressing the back leaf with a toothpick. This tells me the problem is with the switch, and I didn't damage the board with my ham-handed removal of the soldered over screws. It may have happened while pulling the caps- I should have tested at that stage before moving on to the backplate.
Has anyone had success in repairing non-registering switches like this? Perhaps some bending of the leaf springs? The prospect of having to de-solder and source a replacement switch does not thrill me.
Attachments
omni_backspace.jpg
omni_backspace.jpg (474 KiB) Viewed 6061 times

User avatar
thefarside

07 Feb 2022, 19:29

dotdash wrote:
07 Feb 2022, 16:03
Small update.
I've been busy with other things, but did some testing on the backspace key. While the switch doesn't want to work, I can get it to register by opening the switch and pressing the back leaf with a toothpick. This tells me the problem is with the switch, and I didn't damage the board with my ham-handed removal of the soldered over screws. It may have happened while pulling the caps- I should have tested at that stage before moving on to the backplate.
Has anyone had success in repairing non-registering switches like this? Perhaps some bending of the leaf springs? The prospect of having to de-solder and source a replacement switch does not thrill me.
Regarding the backspace switch, I had a similar issue with the left control switch on a Focus keyboard. Sometimes there’s buildup in between the contacts of the switch plate. You can pull off the contact leaf on top and using a toothpick, gently open up the switch plate to expose the inner contacts and blow some air to clear out any debris. Here’s a link to my post that has some pictures of that process:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=25297&p=481886&hili ... ey#p481886

Ultimately this didn’t work for me… I wound up desoldering the switch and replacing it with a spare. Hopefully you can fix it without having to desolder but it’s not that hard if that winds up being your only option.

User avatar
dotdash

02 Mar 2022, 01:05

Slow updates here. The Omnikey got put on the back burner. In the meantime I did get some salvaged/cleaned switches. The salvage switches look the same, except for the alps logo being upside down compared to the originals in the Omnikey.
To try one last thing before resorting to the soldering iron, I switched out the innards of one of the replacement switches for the original on the backspace. No real change, but I noticed it would register it hit at a certain angle. I pulled it open again, and held a popsicle stick on the back leaf, just over the hole, and bent the two legs out with a pick. After re assembly, and some heavy presses, it finally clicked into place and started working. I may have just delayed the inevitable soldering, but for now I'm happy to have the thing working again.

User avatar
HKG

25 Mar 2022, 09:45

Omnikeys are amazing boards that are built really well. Congrats on your new Alps board!

Post Reply

Return to “Gallery”