I am a full convert to the Holy Buckling Spring religion. I went from a decent 90s Compaq keyboard, to several no-name pieces of crap, to Keytronic and Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro before being worthy enough of the One True Keyboard. Since knowing about them and trying one out I had been looking for one for more than a decade and it wasn't until 2013 I was able to get my very own. Before that the only time I've seen one for sale around here was a 122 key terminal model at a flea market many years ago, but it was too expensive for a filthy nonstandard keyboard lying on a flea market so I didn't grab it. In retrospective I should've grabbed it anyway for parts (if I knew that a decade later I'd need spare keycaps and stuff), but oh well.
In 2013 I finally managed to find one at a flea market, not in the best of shape but fully working:
It's a Mexican Model M manufactured in July 1989 sporting the ISO Latin American layout, which is awesome since I don't like the ANSI layout. I'm actually used to the European Spanish layout which is slightly different, but all the keys fit so it's not a problem if you touch type.
After a thorough cleaning it became my daily driver instantly. Later I was able to snatch the missing keycaps off another Mexican M I got.
Later that year I got my hands on two broken Mexican Model Ms which are slightly different. They have a manufacturing date of 1993, the IBM logo is blue instead of gray and the silk screening on the keycaps runs a little thinner than in the old ones. As you can see the first thing I did was cannibalize the keycaps my good Model M needed. 😜
Both have damaged membranes and the big gray keys (Enter, long Shift, etc) get stuck when pressed and no amount of cleaning and lubrication seems to help. I remember seeing a possible solution on Deskthority a while ago, but I didn't understand it, and of course it's gone now and I didn't think of saving it, because stuff never disappears off the Internet, right? 😢
I cleaned one up just to see how it looked, even though both are still broken:
One day I'll get around to get me all the parts needed for bolt-modding both of these, along with contacting Unicomp and asking them if their replacement membranes work for the ISO Model Ms, and if they happen to have language-specific replacement keycaps. For now they sit in storage.
In these few short years I realized how attached I became to these keyboards. My fingers have become really spoiled and I started to worry about not having a second working one for other computers I might use regularly, either for work or play. Fortunately I was able to fulfill that at the end of last year, got me another one at a local retro computing forum. Not cheap, but not eBay-expensive either. It's a gray-logo 1988 model, just in need of a slight cleaning.
Only the bottom keyboard is mine, the top ANSI model M was snatched by a friend.
Here's its pedigree:
Overall I'm quite happy to have two working units in my preferred layout, and I hope to repair the other two someday.
Finding these in the third world is not an easy task, a decade+ long search has finally borne fruit, but I'm still on the lookout for more. 😜
"It's science. I ain't gotta explain sh*t" 
