Even though I had already restored a model F AT before, this time I wanted to do something a little bit more drastic: ANSI mod!...kinda.. I also wanted to give it a cool paint job as well.
When the board arrived, it looked like this:
Which actually wasn't as bad as the first model F I restored, so I was in high spirits at this point. I decided I wasn't going to sand-blast this plate, but instead hand sand it (mostly because I didn't want to keep pestering the owner of the sand-blast shop - that guy must think I'm nuts by now, going in every other week to get some keyboard plates blasted). When I started taking apart the insides though, that's when I realized this project was going to be much different than the first F I restored:
The foam had melted on to...wait, disintegrated on to - still no, assimilated with.... "become one" with the barrel plate, and even some of barrels.
I had never had to replace foam before, but I was up for the challenge!
The first thing I did was paint the top case - which went really well!
Next was sanding down the plate.
I read a lot of guides out there on how to replace foam, and settled on some art foam that I found at Hobby Lobby. I didn't have a template (at that point in time) so instead, I thought it was a smart idea to put some foam underneath the plate and then spray paint the plate, thus also painting the part of the foam that I needed to X-acto knife away:
As it turns out, using nothing but an X-acto knife to cut circles is the stupidest idea anyone can come up with....okay second stupidest idea anyone can come up with (keep reading...)
So I went out and bought a die to finish it
But I wasn't very happy with it, mainly because it was still all jaggedy and didn't look nice, which means absolutely nothing since no one sees it, but it still really bothered me, and plus I was worried the spacing was a bit off, since some of the edges for where I should have cut were a bit fuzzy.
That's when I got in contact with wcass (thanks again dude!) and he provided me with the templates that I needed for me to start over, and I was much happier with how the second one turned out
Now you're probably thinking "but gains, that one looks all jaggedy too, you should probably also redo tha -" NO. NO, OKAY!? FUCK PUNCHING HOLES IN FOAM. I DON'T WANNA DO IT.
*ahem*
So anyway, this is where the real challenge started: re-assembling the keyboard.
I consider myself a reasonably well-minded man. I got my bachelor's in mathematics, and my master's in teaching. Every day on the job I am teaching my students to assess problems before just jumping right into trying to solve them. I tell them to examine what might be the best ways to start each problem logically.
Well apparently when I'm off the job, FUCK logic!
I had all the barrels in with all the springs (i forgot to mention, the springs had all rusted, and some have split in twain - luckily I had a model F XT lying around and harvested the springs from it - BTW, did you know the flippers for XT and ATs are different? The XT has a trapezoidal looking shape, while the AT is rectangular) - I was feeling pretty good about this. so I elevated the plate a bit so I could hit the end of it with a rubber mallet to slide the tabs into place. So far so good.
Except, for some unknown reason, I put a block of wood against the side of the back-plate I wasn't hitting....so I was just hitting this backplate with a hammer over and over and trying to figure out why it wasn't moving at all. I just kept swinging the hammer harder and harder and harder, and eventually bent the end I was hitting....
I did that for like an hour before realizing that I'm a fucking moron....
after some time of re-evaluating my critical thinking skills and overall mental well-being, I went back at it with a more normal strategy and got them locked in place. But of course, I had done a bit of damage...so here's what it ended up looking like:
I can't really say I'm proud, but fuck me if I was about to go through re-doing all that shit again...maybe another day when I have free time and don't know how to kill it... I was pretty upset with my stupidity from earlier too, and I just wanted to be done with this project.
Overall, I guess I'm happy with it. I'm typing on it right now, and since you can't see the knicks in the plate while the top case is on it, you'd think it was a really well-done restoration!
I still need to make a converter for it. Right now, the backslash key/"such that" key (vertical bar key....set notation joke) does nothing. Also I'd like to move esc to where f2. I thought about also including the alt-key mod in the restoration, but decided I didn't want to cut the plate for the two extra barrels.
Anyway, even though it was a pain, and even though I had a brief moment of stupidity, I did ultimately have fun restoring the board. It works great now!
Thanks for reading!
またね。
//gainsborough.
