Cleaning Waterdamaged PowerBook Keyboard

[dontwalkhand]

When I bought this PowerBook, someone spilled soda into the PowerBook's keyboard, and everything on this computer works fine, except for the letters S, W, and Z.

If you pull the keys off, You can see the soda marks, I know with desktop keyboards, you can clean this and it would be fine, however, this has the keys that light up, so I do not know. What should I do besides pay $250 for a new keyboard from Apple?

 

[theDUB]

Jut type everything normally but ithout thoe three letter.

 

[Sun Baked]

Likely soda got down inside the 3 plastic layers of the keyboard.

The laptop keyboards are fragile and can break, so it isn't likely something you can clean without destroying the keyboard.

With the desktops, if a general cleaning doesn't work, you can delaminate the keyboard and clean the traces and repair any that are damaged with a cheap Radio Shack electronic trace repair pen.

It is just 3 layers of plastic, with a spacer as the center layer with a bunch of holes, and two conductive printed layers that create the switch replacements by squeezing the two layers into contact when you hit a key.

If a liquid gets towards the edges of the 3 layers it can wick up inside and stop the electronic contact, or simply dissolve the conductive ink.