Deep Cleaning and Maintenance

If you’re reading this, you’re either: a) Curious as to what the process entails, b) Haven’t cleaned your keyboard in several months, or c) A little bit OCD about cleanliness, and want to get any nastiness out from under your fingertips. Regardless, I hope I can satisfy all of you with the next few steps.

Start by removing all of the keys from your board. And by all of them, I mean all of them. This allows us to get to the very bottom of the board, and to get to all of the dust there under. Additionally, we can clean every dimension of each key. You can do this by wedging something flat (your knife or screwdriver) under the corner of a key, and slowly popping it off. Take care to use a gentle amount of force, as you don’t want to damage the key mechanism underneath.

With the Quick Fire, you can do it much easier with the included key puller. With it, I was able to pull keys off almost every 5 seconds, if not faster, allowing me to have the board all prepped for cleaning in just about 10 minutes.

NOTE: On big keys like the space bar, Shift, Enter, Caps lock, etc, you may have a metal bar that connects the keycap to the base and balances it. Be extra careful during removal to be sure that you don’t snap these off.

So you don’t lose your keys, find a bowl or some container to store them in.

As before, take some compressed air and blast out what dust you can from between the domes/switches. Also blow out any dust that may have gotten into them. Then, using either your Q-Tips or cloth, wipe down the keyboard base to get rid of anything remaining. For very resilient gunk, break out that handy-dandy toothbrush that I mentioned at the very beginning to try and dislodge it.

A similar formula goes for the keys themselves. First blow some air under the key caps to force out any dust bunnies that have barricaded themselves here. Again, using Q-Tips or cloth moistened with isopropyl alcohol, wipe them down. And once again, DO NOT apply alcohol directly to your keys. For gunk that just won’t let go, break out your trusty toothbrush (which I trust will never again be going into any mouths), moisten it with some alcohol, and scrub the gunk away.

Once you are satisfied, replace each key back to its respective place.

Lastly – marvel at how clean your keyboard now is!