[Noisebridge-discuss] [sudo-discuss] mx brown switches in salvage

[Jake]

a hotplate covered with clean sand heated up to 400 degrees (celsius) will 
be a surface on which you can place a circuitboard covered with such 
switches, and then you can pluck them out of the board as their solder 
melts.  This is how old boards had their parts salvaged from them back 
when people still did that.

if you don't have the right hotplate and you want to use a skillet 
instead, you'll likely have to cut the circuitboard in half or thirds so 
that it will be small enough to fit in the skillet of sand.  no big deal.

you could also remove them one at a time, using a desoldering tool. 
There's a motorized one at sudoroom, which is basically a gun-shaped 
soldering iron with a hollow tip and a foot-pedal activated vacuum pump. 
You could use that to pull the solder out of the hole for one of the two 
pins of each key, and then use a regular soldering iron to heat up the 
second one while pulling the key out with the other hand.

good luck,
-jake

On Tue, 20 Sep 2016, Trent Robbins wrote:

> Does anyone know a good way to salvage from 101-105 mx brown keyboard
> switches?
>
> I'm planning on building my own keyboard this fall or winter and have
> plenty of time to source scrap.
>
> http://cubiq.org/build-your-very-own-pc-keyboard
>
> Build process is as complex as you'd expect.
>
> Teensy firmware: https://github.com/tmk/tmk_keyboard
>
>
>
> Trent
>