Water Spill on Keyboard Space Bar Not Working

Question

Greetings,
One of my employees recently spilled a cup of water on their keyboard. I unplugged the keyboard, shook the water out of it and it seemed to work fine. A few days later, I was informed that the "space key" was no longer working.
Is there anything I should try to repair it? I am used to being "hands on" with repairs to our systems (we have about 30 Mac's on site). But, I wasn't sure if spills are considered irreversible damage to keyboards, etc. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Chip Henley
Administrator
CBS Press, Inc.
[email protected]
1Ghz eMac G4   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   Systems administrator for printing company.

Answer 1

Don't use the dish washer trick with an eMac keyboard (the Mac keyboard with the nice crumb and liquid catching clear under-tray). I recently had a spill on my keyboard and decided to take apart the keyboard to investigate why some of my old keyboard cleaning tricks were not working. On disassembly I discovered these keyboards are not like the keyboards of yester-year.
Old keyboards were simply a rigid printed circuit board (PCB) and then the keys over it that pressed down and shorted traces on the PCB to make a key stroke. hen those got dirty you could very easily literally wash them, let them dry and continue to use.
These newer Mac keyboards do not use the same method. Now they have a few layers of thin flexible plastic sheets with traces imprinted in them. Several of these are sandwiched together. The keys above press down and make contact and also press the layers of contacts together.
The problem with the new method is once you get liquid in there, the liquid seeps between the thin plastic layers and simply sits forever with no air flow to dry out the liquid. So once you get liquid in there, it will either never dry out or take a very long time (months minimum) to dry out.
Once you get liquid in there, about the only solution is to pull the keyboard apart and separate all the layers and let them air dry or wipe them down. It is a PITA since each key has a little rubber dome that goes over each spot and they are not attached to the keys, so you have to put the layers back together, then put each of those 100+ rubbers in place then attach the backing rigid piece without moving any of the rubbers. It takes a fair amount of time.
My keyboard still doesn't work 100%, so I will buy a new one one of these days. Next time, I won't even bother with trying to clean it. I will just spend the $29.95 and get a new one.
Patrick