deskthority

I spent this weekend with cleaning this 40-year-old Kontron PSI 80 keyboard:



It turned out quite nice but I have some questions to the more knowledgeable people here who may know this model:

1.) I guess the case is made of wood. My suspicion is based on some small dents, chipping around the screws, and the overall thickness of the walls. However, I didn't want too scrape off more paint. Can somebody confirm this?



2.) Pink springs. Do you think it's the coating or some kind of oxidation? When I put them in a glass of water, the water slowly turned pink too.



I posted more photos here: https://kbd.news/Kontron-PSI-80-keyboard-1456.html

Great looking board! Tall stem keytronic are honestly pretty nice switches once the foam is sorted. They respond very well to a light application of lube.

A lot of stuff from that era was this sort of plastic: Not entirely sure what it is exactly, my guess is polystyrene just based on smell when melted. You could take a soldering iron to a hidden section and give it a good whiff to determine if it's wood or plastic at least.

dovenyi wrote: 29 May 2022, 23:31
2.) Pink springs. Do you think it's the coating or some kind of oxidation? When I put them in a glass of water, the water slowly turned pink too.

The wiki shows a Keytronics mechanism with a blue spring. My guess is that the color was an identifier for different weights?

jsheradin wrote: 30 May 2022, 04:16A lot of stuff from that era was this sort of plastic

Thanks for the tip!

Polecat wrote: 30 May 2022, 06:41My guess is that the color was an identifier for different weights?

Thanks for the info. Now that I think of it, my Reuters from these years came with two different types of springs as well: silver for most keys and black for the 3u one + maybe spacebar. But blue-pink is much cooler than silver-black.

I've got a similar Kontron! Glad to see that the odd arrow-keys seem to be the actual original layout

I had the same experience when cleaning the springs as far as I remember.

Additionally, I cleaned the case with isopropyl alcohol which ruined some of the powder-coating.

dovenyi wrote: 30 May 2022, 15:41
Thanks for the info. Now that I think of it, my Reuters from these years came with two different types of springs as well: silver for most keys and black for the 3u one + maybe spacebar. But blue-pink is much cooler than silver-black.

A couple more examples of the pink Keytronics springs on this page (scroll down a bit for #2). I knew I had seen them recently, but didn't have time to dig until now:

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