Experience of cleaning and repairing an IBM model M after a beer accident

[heinz]

I have a model M that I have bolt modded. I spilled beer on it. I then disassembled it and cleaned the membranes with industrial alcohol. Then I discovered that I had broken one of the traces (the ASDF trace). I glued the trace with thermal conductive glue first because at first I falsely remembered it to be electro conductive. I removed the glue and broke the trace even more (so that a big chunk was missing). Acquired some electro conductive glue and painted the missing part of the trace with it. At first it didn't conduct at all which is natural. It started passing continuity test after 4 hours but didn't work when I tested it with connected plates 2 bolts attached. It started doing something after 10 hours of curing. Even after 24 hours of curing it didn't work as intended - it sometimes didn't react and sometimes produced chatter. In the following days it somehow started working. I assembled the keyboard. Now its occasionally behaving badly after computer startup again: sometimes no response sometimes chatter. Only that it starts working correctly after some "warmup". I was able to write this text without any problems at all.
Also note that when working with the disassembled model M it's best to not to wear a long sleeved shirt because a loose string could get tangled to a buckling spring, stretch it and bend it. It happened to me twice before I learned. I had to cut a piece of spring so that it would not register a keypress all the time. The key works and feels normal now.

Also a question : What would you do to remove this bad behavior at the beginning (not registering and chatter)? I am getting an m2 nut driver so I might be able to tighten the nuts and bolts some more. Or is it a bad idea? Could I crack the barrel plate by doing this?
PS: The keys that are behaving badly the most are not from the asdf cluster that I repaired.but for example 'k'.

[Falkenroth]

Sounds like you have had a hell of a time with this keyboard the last few days. My guess it's more likely the keys malfunctioning than the membrane. I would look closely at the springs and pivot plates. Also check seating issues with the spring and keycap. Defiantly don't want to over tighten the bolts on the board. Doubt that is the problem. Double check your membrane alignment and maybe replace the springs on the pivot plates that might have been screwed up. Did you wash all the pivot plates and springs?

[heinz]

You are right, I didn't wash the pivot plates and springs. I will leave that for later when I am really fed up by that 'warmup' before the keys start working. Today it wasn't long though - needed only a few keypresses before it started working again. I will reply to this thread when anything changes. When it becomes ok by itself (just by using the keyboard) or by washing the pivot plates.

[modelf]

Ms can handle a lot of things, but they can't handle spills.

[HexCod]

I think this new membrane sheet made by unicomp can be a solution. Check this: https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/MEM

[heinz]

The problem seems to be that I have low quality nuts and bolts. I tried to tighten them but they just kept screwing around without tightening anything and each time I tried it stayed working for a while. Now I changed some of the nuts to different ones that I had from another batch and it has worked 3 days in a row now.