Laptop Keyboard Repair?

Today one of the keys on the keyboard of my laptop broke free :cry: It was not due to excessive violence, I was cleaning it.

I called to Dell about this, and they said my 200 euros I spent on the 3-year warranty were useless for this, as keys that have seperated are not covered under warranty.

So I had a look at how I could fix it. I think I understand the mechanism and how to assemble it (it's a sort of hinging mechanism), so if I could get just get replacement parts for the broken ones I could fix the keyboard!

However, I don't have those parts - the injection moulding apparatus is chucked away somewhere behind the Chinese wall and as such I can't get the genuine parts unless I break another keyboard for spares

So what could be the solution? You may make a guess here, though I'm not sure it has anything to do with 3D printing



Oh wait, it has! I have to wait for tomorrow until I can make pictures of the parts - all I can say is that they're pretty tiny, a bit like this:



The hinges on there are as small as 0.7mm in diameter on my keyboard. So in theory, they could be modeled and then printed in WSF.

My question is: Has anyone tried this before? How much flex can WSF handle at such small thickness and size before it breaks? (As I need to stretch a part to fit another one in. I doubt it's possible to print them assembled as making 0.6mm clearances on the hinges will leave the parts sloppy and/or too large to fit.

WSF has plenty of flex (the F in WSF stands for Flexible). What I would do is make a single piece to replace the whole assembly. All it needs to do is have some spring so lift the key back up and hold it in place. Then you could sell it without and infringements

Thanks for your suggestion The hinging system is not actually for the spring function though, the rubber part in the centre does that. The hinging system is mainly to keep the key aligned it seems, and to make sure it is pressed down regardless of where on the key the pressure is applied. So making it from one part may work, but it will make the key completely different from the rest, hence why I was looking to replicate the design.

At least for my laptop, you can't see under the keys at all, so if one were different, as long as it acted the same, I would never know.

I had a similar project awhile ago.
The goal was to model and print a keyboard button and fit it onto a keyboard.
The problem was that the walls on the button were extremely thin, so i had to thicken them quite a lot to pass as printable. I did this by finding out where the extra thickness would not prevent the buttons movement.


The print worked perfectly, after some smoothing of surfaces with a scalpell. Unfortunately i have no actual photos of it, but here´s a pic of the model.

Cool to see others have done it too! I just finished the second part, put them in an assembly and solved some minor interference issues. Here it is:



They are two small parts that fit inside each other and work as a hinge. I might also make an altered version that could be printed as one piece, so assembly is easier: Somehow, Dell manages to stretch, then assemble these parts without breaking. The hinging axles everywhere in the part are just 0.7mm in diameter and the biggest wall thickness is 1.5mm, so it's pretty amazing that the parts don't break when you consider they will need to stretch them about 1.5mm to fit the hinging axles of the small part inside the large one. That's why I'm concerned these replicas of the originals will break - injection moulded nylon can handle more stresses than 3D printed nylon.

There are some other alternatives to make assembly easier, so I will consider those too as these parts will be part of a bigger order with lots of different parts.

You could improve the flexibility of the nylon by warming the outer piece under hot water. just make sure it´s not too hot, so it will return in it´s original shape.
I´ve used this method once, when a thin piece of my model was abit curved. I just put it under a hot tap water and reshaped it.

Cool, thanks for the advice. I have ordered two pairs, so there is a bit of room for error Or if there are no errors, to keep it as a little souvenir