A Failed Keyboard Tinkering Session

It was Double 11, so I figured I’d refurbish my old, grimy Kaitian 84 with brown switches — the keyboard I’ve been using for years.

By “refurbish” I mean wash the keycaps and the board itself…

Naturally, I’m lazy, so I didn’t bother washing the keycaps. I just bought new ones and started cleaning the keyboard body.

For the cleaning I used some random cleaning sponge cubes my wife bought — white cube-shaped sponges that look soft but apparently grind like crazy, and they wear down the more you scrub.

Wiped the keyboard clean, put the new keycaps on. Perfect!

Plugged it into the PC to check. Works! Flawless!

Then the tragedy hit.

Pretty soon I noticed the keyboard wasn’t responding. After double- and triple-checking, I was certain: the keyboard was fried.

I spent ages tracking down the cause. My guess is that when I cleaned the body, I forgot there was still some water inside the USB port, so the port probably burned out.

This keyboard has been with me for years. Pretty much every shitty eroge impression on this shitty blog was written with this shitty keyboard, so I’ve built up something like a cumdump’s worth of attachment to it. I couldn’t just let it die that easily!

So I hit up Taobao and found a local keyboard repair guy in Zhengzhou named Master Wang.

Master Wang said fixing this kind of thing was too casual for him. Just as I was about to say I was in Zhengzhou too and go see him right away, he said, unhurried:

“I’m not in Zhengzhou anymore. I’m in Xinzheng. Zhengzhou housing prices are too high, I can’t afford the rent, so I went back home. Just mail it to me.”

In the end I sent the keyboard to Master Wang. Once he got it, he even called me specifically with a repair plan: he could fix the USB port, but not with an original part — hard to find. How about just wiring a USB cable straight to the port and fixing it in place?

I agreed. The keyboard came back, and everything worked fine. The cost was just 20 yuan.

So I guess this counts as a failed keyboard tinkering session?