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Cleaning my Keyboard
 

Hey guys, I recently moved house and went through a long painful month without internet. Naturally, I ran out of things to do and went on to discover the true meaning of profound boredom. Then I realized that my keyboard hadn’t been cleaned in over 6 months and that it was in a pretty disgusting state. Prior to this, if I cleaned my keyboard I did it quite swiftly and treated it like a chore, but this time I was determined to keep myself distracted from my inability to connect to the world and so ended up doing the best cleaning job I’ve done in my life.
So here is a little walk through of how I like to clean my keyboard, with tricks and tips that some of you may not know.

Here are some of the things I used:
• Alcohol wipes (moist tissue works too)
• Q-tips
• Key Cap remover (I just use a plastic card)



Step 1: Removing key caps

This bit is always quite fun, as your motivation is at its highest and you get that false sense of productiveness. I tend to do this bit as I watch a video, but as mentioned before I didn’t have internet, so I had to settle for listening to music (Chili Peppers all the way!!!!!!!).
I know that there are special keycap removers out there, but to be honest it’s a rip off to buy them, so I used a plastic card. To remove the caps, wedge a corner of the card in under the key and gently wiggle it loose. Make sure you are careful when doing this because although mechanical keys are quite durable, you really don’t want to break any thing.
I like to organize the removed keycaps into the keyboard’s layout just because it makes it easier when you put them back on.



Step 2: Cleaning the inside of the keyboard.

At this stage I was starting to lose interest and wanted to go do something else because I have a pretty short attention span when it comes to non-game related things. However I had all my keys sitting on my table and didn’t want to just leave them there. So I continued on in disgust, as I started to find 6 months worth of food crumbs, dust and to my surprise a dead bug!


I found this little dead fella among the many crumbs and hairs. Poor guy probably got crushed by my shift key before it could infest my keyboard with eggs.

I start by blowing really hard from an angle to remove all the dust that you can initially. Now you use the Q-tips to get in between the narrow nooks and crannies and clean away any residual dust. If you are feeling really anal, clean the inside of your keyboard twice; once with dry Q-tips and once with moist Q-tips. Putting a drop of water on the Q-tips helps to wipe away any stains from prior mini spillages of food or drink.
After I clean the inside, it’s also good to wipe down the frame of the keyboard, as this is where the drops of instant ramen soup seem to land. Using alcohol wipes or wet tissue both work for this.

Step 3: Cleaning the Key Caps

This is the most tedious part of cleaning a keyboard, because you have to wipe each key cap individually. But I knew I was nearly finished, so the excitement having a clean keyboard for the first time in 6 months encouraged me on.
For this I use alcohol wipes. Mostly because they seem to wipe away that congealed, build-up of hand and finger oil really nicely. You can use moist tissue for this, but I find that it’s not as effective and can cause you to miss some spots because when the keys are wet it’s hard to see the dirt.


So dirty T_T

Step 4: Final Touches

Be careful when putting the key caps back on, because there is nothing more confusing than having a few keys out of place. But once all the keys are in place, I like to do a final check to see if all the keys are clean and if there are any visible stains left anywhere on the keyboard. And I was done

Re: Cleaning my Keyboard
 

Keeping this on tabs for when I clean next time.

Last time I cleaned I did it wrong..

Thanks for putting this up mate!

Re: Cleaning my Keyboard
 

came to this blog expecting a keyboard, was disappointed. 0/10

MATE YOU DONT POST A KEYBOARD BLOG WITHOUT THE KEYBOARD !!!!!!!!!!!!

Re: Cleaning my Keyboard
 

how do you reconnect the space bar which has those metal bars that run underneath them?

Re: Cleaning my Keyboard
 

with extreme difficulty

Re: Cleaning my Keyboard
 

and no small measure of stupidity

Re: Cleaning my Keyboard
 

u can use a pin or something to spread the metal bar while you put the space bar back. But yeah its a bit difficult

Re: Cleaning my Keyboard
 

I use compressed air usually along with qtips!

Re: Cleaning my Keyboard
 

My keyboard was similar to yours when I first opened it to clean it (and fix some o-rings). Hairs and full of other kinds of shit that I didn't expect to be there! Rice... sesame seeds.. you name it you got it. The keycaps were even sticky for some and I think it might be because of decomposed stuff or something. No it's not cum please stahp. It's just fun though when I typed with the keyboard without keycaps, and putting them back was a nice experience for me also.

Re: Cleaning my Keyboard
 

I can never get it as clean as I'd like it to be.

Re: Cleaning my Keyboard
 

good guide mate! i hope this works for beer... unfortunately some of my macro keys dont come out so they are perma buggered

Re: Cleaning my Keyboard
 

oh shnap!

anyway good guide!!! shall get to cleaning mine soon

Re: Cleaning my Keyboard
 

Any reason why the keycaps (alone) cant be done in a dishwasher on cold cycle? Might just need a quick rinse to make sure all the soap is gone from the nooks. For those going down the alcohol route, using wipes is likely the safest. If you are using your own alcohol, dilute methylated spirits (actually its ethanol) down to 30% with water. Or most cd/lens cleanings kits use isopropanol (aka 2-propanol) which SHOULD be ok to use straight, or you can 1:1 it with water. Compressed air is definetely easier than blowing, and means you dont have to wipe away all the spittle. You can also buy kb cleaning kits. Arnor gave me one at a lan once that comes with an awesome brush. I think it was an Asus kit, so was probs just a promo piece.