Tutorial: Keyboard cleaning and maintenance (membrane keyboard)

I've been the proud owner of a Razer Lycosa for the past 3 years and I've been very satisfied about the performance and the features of the keyboard, and I have always considered it a great investment and one of my most long lasting and sturdy peripherals that I ever owned.



But as all good things in life it comes that time to get things cleaned and take it apart. piece by piece.

Things you will need:
1. Regular plastic pen
2. Painting brush
2. Isopropyl alcohol
3. q-tips
4. cotton balls

Well before going crazy and disassembling each and every screw that you come upon and pop all the keys out there is something to take in consideration. The keys are not all the same and the layout of keyboard is different, in some cases more than others.

I'm fortunate to have a well known brand of peripherals and a interesting kind that a lot of people on the internet took a bunch of pictures of. So I cheated a bit and skipped this step.

The first and MOST IMPORTANT step of doing this right and keeping track of all your keys is taking a picture of the keyboard before you take it apart so you have an idea where all the keys go and whats the correct way of installing them.
VERY IMPORTANT: if you pry a key off and you see something like this STOP this tutorial is not for you and you have a mechanical keyboard, the maintenance on those is a bit more extensive.

So after all of this is done you can pop them out, the most easy and quick way to do it is help yourself by a regular pen to get under the first key (plastic pen recommended) and pry it out. After that go around sticking a finger under the key and popping them one by one.
It should be fairly easy and you will go around in a few minutes.

After taking everything apart you should be left with this.

After that it's the time to inspect the membrane. if you don't want to unscrew everything and just do it like me, a light cleaning before the holidays so that your keyboard gets a nice present:). Visually inspect the membrane, sometimes they break off and you are left with a sticky key that won't push correctly or you feel something is wrong with it.

If you wanna go full cleaning mad on it, turn it face down and unscrew every screw that you lay your eyes upon. We will be not covering that here but it's pretty straight forward, if you don't have a mechanical keyboard. ;)

After this step you'll have to use to the best knowledge you have the q-tips and the cotton balls to clean everything and get all the dust and residues off, since our hand are always either a bit sweaty or secreting some oils trough the pores to keep our skin moist and not cracking it's damn sure you're going to have a bit to clean off. Take each and every key a rub them off also clean the spaces where the keys seat after all is said and done you're going to be left off with a hand-full of keys and a key-less keyboard. So it's time to put them back together and this is where our predisassembly picture comes into action and you can see where what goes:).

I hope this will help guide you trough the easy but yet necessary process of cleaning you membrane keyboard and get you a clean as new keyboard.