Well... Don't forget to use ferrite bead, some devices stop working propperly without it. And DIN-5 are still pretty easy to find these days, at least here, in Russia.

Really? I don't remember ever seeing one of those on a keyboard.

And yeah I have plenty of crappy old DIN-5 boards I can plunder. The Model M of course would have had a PS2 originally but I'd just be using a converter anyway, so I might as well just put a DIN-5 on there. Would that make me a bad person?

badmofo wrote:

The Model M of course would have had a PS2

Mine has the DIN style plug...

badmofo wrote:

Really? I don't remember ever seeing one of those on a keyboard.

All my keyboards have one of these on a cable inside them..)

Well it wasn't all smooth sailing but I got there in the end. There wasn't much info around about this model which is a later, Lexmark manufactured one circa '95. I had to make an educated guess at the pinout of the cable connector and had the data and clock wires the wrong way round first go. I wouldn't have thought that would cause any damage but the lovely little 386 I was testing on now won't recognise a keyboard. Who tests things like this on their prized 386?? Idiot! Hopefully it's just a blown keyboard controller fuse.

The other problem I had was non-responsive and stuck keys. The non-responsive ones came good with a bit of use, but the stuck one (the enter key on the number pad) took some serious pounding. In the end I left it powered up for an hour or so, bashing on it every now and then, and it came good in the end.

Anyway here's the patient, found leaning against a tree on a cold dark night looking very sorry for itself. Cable chopped off, covered in grime and soon to be collected by the hard rubbish truck:

I had to grind down a socket to fit the tapered holes at the back, at the bottom of which are the screws:

The damage:

This is the dirtiest keyboard I've seen. Compressed air was not match for that shit, much scrubbing with a stiff brush was required too:

Most of the keys have easy to remove key caps over these blanks; some were in the wrong position but they were all there luckily. I soaked them overnight in soapy water:

The new cable; I decided to go with PS2 because none of the DIN-5 cables I had included the extra ground wire. And there's that ferrite bead you mentioned RacoonRider, tucked inside the donor keyboard like you said.

The pinout turned out to be:

white = ground
yellow = data
red = clock
black = 5v

And here it is all clean and ready for action. That old IBM quality really shows - the plastic shines like new after a wash and each key press still feels like a party under my fingers. I'd never used a mechanical keyboard before, but now I understand why they call these Model M's "the one true keyboard"!

You have done an amazing job at restoring that keyboard, which had suffered from wanton abuse and neglect. I'm surprised that all the keycaps were still there.

One of the few downsides to the Model M is that you cannot easily clean the membrane underneath the spring plate. IBM went cheap and used plastic tags to hold the keyboard assembly together. Also, you have to be very careful when pulling up keystems that you do not knock the springs out of alignment. If you do, you must replace the string. Makes it more difficult to safely clean the dirt and grime from the base of the keyboard.

Yeah the plastic tags aren't great. There are instructions on the interwebs for removing the tags and replacing them with screws / nuts. Lotta work though!

I got my 386 going again too - it was a blown keyboard controller fuse. It tested my soldering skills but all's well that ends well.