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As a born-again-Atarian I don't want to withhold you my repairmethod for XE keyboards. I have used this method around 1987 to succesfully get the XE's of 2 of my friends running again. Symptom with both Atari's: certain keys didn't function anymore.
I realise that it isn't exactly rocketscience, and I am probably not the first to deploy this repairmethod, but you never know, it might just help someone get his/her computer back on its feet again. In that case I consider my efforts well spent. Too much stuff gets trashed already without reason, that can get an extra lease of life with minimal effort. It almost brings tears to my eyes to see people smashing a 400 just for fun. I wish these guys went and smashed their own heads in. I would personally like to have an 800, as I always liked its retro look, but they are really rare here in Europe. I´m amazed and green with envy reading stories of people picking up an 800 in a thrift store for only a few dollars...
To see people trash one for fun is completely beyond me.But let´s get back to my story. As you all know, the construction of the XE's keyboard is not particularly solid. It consists of a metal bottomplate containing a foilsheet with conductive tracks on the upperside. On top of this is the actual light grey plastic keyboard. Sadly Atari made both the bottomplate and the keyboard out of a relatively soft material, that deforms easily under strain (i.e. when pressing keys). The effect is that the keyboard can slide about on the bottomplate, and in doing so cut through some of the conductive tracks on the foil. Those of you who have actually taken the effort of dismantling a keyboard will know what I mean. I have tried several times to fix it with silverpaint, but this just wouldn't hold for very long.
So I thought out a more definitive repairmethod, and asked a company to make me a copy of the foilsheet out of PCB-material. First they made a contactfilm of the original foilsheet and fixed the damaged tracks with a fine feltpad. This film was then was used to make the actual PCB out of 0.2mm thick pertinax. The tracks were tinned which was standard procedure there.
Putting the parts back together was quite straightforward, but it was a tedious and time consuming job to connect this new keyboard PCB to the 24-pin connector on the mainboard. The original foilsheet has a 'contactflap' of foil with 24 tracks for this. I constructed this 'flap' out of flatcable and an excess piece of pertinax. As it goes, the company had made a PCB of the entire foil, including the flap. So I first completely assembled the keyboard, and then cut off the extruding flap making sure there was enough room to solder the flatcable to the PCB. I then used a piece of the remainder of the cut off flap to construct a kind of cardedge connector to go in the 24-pin connector. A piece of 2,5cm in length provided plenty of room to solder the flatcable to. As it is a single sided connector, take care not to solder the cardedge piece the other way around. I guarantee you the keyboard will not work at all then (although nothing will be damaged either).
As I said: I have successfully repaired 2 XE´s in this fashion. The cost of the necessary material was about $ 20 a piece (back in 1987). Not exactly cheap, but IMHO well worth the money. Positive side effect (according to these friends) was that they found typing now felt better and more accurate.
Do note that although the majority of the XL´s has a foilsheet keyboard as well, this one is of a completely different construction, and can not be repaired using the above method. I don´t know how sturdy these are. As the casings of the XL´s are constructed of a less flexible kind of plastic than the XE´s, I think their foilsheets will last longer. I mean, you can easily twist an XE´s casing, try doing that with an XL (without wrecking it, that is)!
There are (a few) XL´s around that have a ´true´ ALPS keyboard, with keys soldered to a PCB (I personally have 2). I speak from experience, that typing on these is way, way, way better than any XL or XE foilsheet keyboard.
re-atari
