White Alps Hanging

[lhutton]

Hello! New user here with a question on the care and feeding of white Alps switches. I recently found an Adesso AEK-105 in one of my bins with old Mac stuff. The board was stored indoors in a container and was in pretty good shape, just some dust in the case. I cleaned it up, obtained an ADB to USB adapter and tested it. The board still works but some of the switches are incredibly stiff, even for white Alps. Plus, a few keys will hang if pressed off center. Could that just be from sitting for a while with out use? Anyone else have problems with white Alps that have sat for a while, like a decade or more? This board never saw heavy use (it was a family member's originally) so I don't think it's wear and tear.

I haven't seen much out there about this particular board either. Doesn't look like it sold very well back in the day.

Thanks!

Edit: found it in the wiki, looks like this board was sold under various brands: wiki/Ortek_Mac-105

adesso_2.jpg (48.76 KiB) Viewed 1438 times

adesso_1.jpg (45.71 KiB) Viewed 1438 times

[spongebob1981]

I found the same phenomena on a white alps board of my own. I lubed the problematic switches and solved it somewhat, but I'm not that sure that was a good idea.
Maybe with some more input from more experienced guys we'll know.

[lucar]

Hi,

I'm palying with some ALPS clicky white switches from an Acer 6012 keyboard, this one:

https://youtu.be/-J10pHNhcoo?t=293

The switches are dusty and almost blocked: I took them all off the pcb and ultrasonic cleaned 3 of them. At the moment the best results I had have been by just lubing the stem alone with a ptfe dry lube.
One thing I noticed is that if the switch upper housing internal leaf side wall is not perfectly clean and ugreased, the leaf does not consistently give the same click sound.

Mine are just preliminary results, I'm still studing them but , anyway, the 3 switches cured like that are working great even if edge pressed.

Luca

[lhutton]

Thanks for the input! I was thinking about lubing the switches but I wasn't sure if that was safe for Alps. When I get some more time I'll take a couple of the worst switches apart and see what's going on in there too.

For now I'll have to suffer with one of my IBMs.