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"Munsaver" at last finished. It's a chopped 1992 IBM Model M122, bolt modded, ANSI modded, converted to USB-C and topped off with some wheelwriter caps.
Below you can see the whole process of building this.
The first cut. Done without much thought. Mostly just to get me working on it.
After a couple more slightly better thought out cuts the first test fit.
Now for sanding and precise fitting
After sanding and fitting the cut seems pretty even
It was welded with a soldering iron. Done outside in a face mask in an attempt to prevent toxic fume inhalation.
Some toxic fumes where inhaled nontheless for the fun of it
Cutting, fitting, sanding and welding done with the bottom.
The cut came out even better for the bottom part which was a bummer since you don't usually look at the bottom of the keeb.
As you can see
The weld had to be tinkered with a couple of times since it was pretty flimsy.
In the end I decided to melt and smush some more plastic of from the leftover pieces into the crack which made it more structurally happy.
And here it as! Next to my beloved SSK
After some well deserved cleaning of the case
The sticker was removed since it didn't match the assembly anyway.
Another look at the strengthened weld. For the more keen-eyed of you, you might notice that on of the clips holding the case at the bottom is missing. A slightly smaller piece of the other clip remains and will hold the right bottom corner of the keyboard together.
Finally a standoff for the screw which I cut off previously was carefully positioned and welded in place.
Strenghened bottom weld.
The backplate was cut with an angle grinder. It was my first time using an angle grinded which was pretty scary. It came out surprisingly well and didn't require that much effort. I love the angle grinder.
Closer and closer to the finished product
The membrane. The main problem of the whole project. After consulting a couple of people I decided against cutting it and trying to connected the traces. Lack of knowledge, appropariate products and a lot of mixed opinions about the long term reliability of such connections made with either copper tape or a conductive marker led me to try out something different.
Removing some material from the membrane while retaining the necessary traces.
After cutting the barrell plate, etc.
Next station... Bolt modification!
Bolt modification done
I love me a good bolt mod
So here is the abomination I came up with. The thicker membrane was just wrapped around the assembly and glued onto the backplate with some electrical tape.
The thinner one which couldn't really be cut in any meaningful way was curled up into a tight roll with a grill skewer. I had a hard time trying to remove it so I just cut off the ends and left it in there. A bit of wood won't hurt my IBM.
the skewer can be seen here
Everything put together.
Now for the stab inserts, caps and testing.
It turned out that I had to add some isolation to a couple of traces which here in touch with each other because of the madness that happened with the membranes but it now works perfectly well.
So that would be it. A very cool little project. Some harsh words can be said about people who cut up historical keyboards. Luckily I don't consider this a particularly historical keyboard. M122's are very commond and pretty undesirable since they only work with IBM's dumb terminals from the 80/90s.
Anyway as a fellow member of the IBM Keyboards Discord group has said:
"Anything that takes a Model M from 'not being used' to 'being used' must be an improvement."