Re: Sugary coffee + keyboard membrane
Very familiar... I worked for a video terminal manufacturer - probably the one that made the terminals you were using. (kidding!) The terminals had very expensive keyboards with them that would periodically be sent back for repairs.
We would take them apart, put the circuit boards into a tank filled with DESOL which is used for degreasing circuit boards before wave soldering (safe stuff --- yeah right!), put the key caps into an ultrasonic cleaner, and when everything was clean, we would reassemble them. They were as good as new and ready for the customers again.
Then one day I got a box of keyboards from a customer. These must've sat in their tech's office for a year at least. They were nicely tagged with "Don't work", "Broke", and "Dead". Oh how helpful. When I opened the box, there was a faint odor of Lipton's Cup A Soup, but I didn't pay attention until I discovered that one of the keyboards was stuck. I mean stuck to a point where nothing moved, and if it did, the keys stayed down.
I opened up that keyboard and found the source of my Lipton's Soup smell. The innards were completely filled up with chicken noodle soup. The yellow bullion stuff had enfused everything. After the DESOL bath and new keycaps, even that keyboard was brought back to life.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
