Cleaning those rubber thingies

[Andrew Schrock]

On Mon, 3 Aug 1998, Jeroen Bruintjes wrote:
> Has anyone come up with *the* solution to clean those rubber pads under a 
> synth-keyboard? My Roland SH-101 keeps getting dirty key contacts. And 
> since I have a TV remote controller that has the same kind of rubber contacts 
> and suffers from the same problem, it would be nice if someone had found a 
> way to keep these darn things clean.

Eww! Ditch those pads ASAP. The problem is just oxidation of the metal pad 
and dust getting trapped on or between the surface and the rubber pads. 

On my mmt-8, I replaced _all_ the buttons (something like 50 of them) with
low-profile tact switches. It works great now, and isn't "mushy" anymore.
If you check hyperreal in the music machines section (under Alesis) I seem
to remember sending something over to them with the appropriate mouser
part numbers in it. It was around $20 for the switches, and I got the
mmt-8 used for $50... so that's an 8 track sequencer with tactile switches
and mute/unmutes for each track for $70. Not too bad. It is somewhat of a
pain to solder all the switches, but trust me, it's worth it not to have
the frustration of trying to mute something (esp. LIVE!) and have the
button "bounce" so it doesn't actually mute... or have the play button
"bounce"... 

If you're really set on not replacing the switches, I've heard the
following works well, and gives a minimal amount of abrasion: Use fine
sandpaper to powder some graphite (rub a pencil against sandpaper).
Carefully collect the powder on the tip of a pencil eraser and _gently_
rub it against the metal contact. I would think that this method is a
little less severe than the razor blade method. 

Andrew

| Andrew Schrock							|
| Network Programmer, Synthesizer and electronic music enthusiast	|
| aschrock at cs.brandeis.edu						|