Clamshell G3 keyboard discoloration

[wottle]

Anyone tried retrobrighting the keys / keyboard on the iBook G3 clamshell. Finally got my hands on one of my holy grail machines, a Lime 466MHz iBook. Unfortunately, I didn't notice in the pictures, but the keyboard seems like it might have been pulled from another machine (Indigo maybe) because the fn key and the number keys are in a lighter blue color that match the one on my Indigo.

Anyway, the problem I'm wondering about is that the white / translucent keys themselves appear to have been pretty badly yellowed compared to the res of the white case. The question I have is, has anyone tried retrobrighting these keys / the entire keyboard?

 

[wottle]

OK, so apparently I looked at pictures and it seems that the Lime iBook didn't have lime lettering on it's keys. Can anyone with a Lime iBook confirm? I may swap the nicer keyboard from my Indigo into the Lime one since they appear to be the same.

 

[3lectr1c]

I don’t have a lime iBook, but I can confirm the only ones with matching accent colors were the blueberry and tangerine colors. The others had gray, although I suppose that means the graphite ones matched. If yours have light blue accents than chances are it’s been swapped. Pics?

 

[wottle]

I don’t know if they’ve been swapped, as I bought both second hand. My indigo 366MHz has blue accents (see first picture). The lime 466 MHz has the same blue accent color, but the keys appear to be significantly less translucent (see second picture). The line keyboard is also significantly more discolored.

For now, I put the nicer, more translucent keyboard in the lime iBook. Also just finished putting an SSD in as the hard drive died on the second boot. That was a fun experience! Especially since I had to do it 3 times. First time, the new SSD case is slightly taller than the original spinning disk. So the left side of the case wouldn’t clip in. So I pulled it apart again to replace with a CF / IDE adapter I had that was tiny. Until I booted and realized the bright red power LED on the adapter lit up the left side of the translucent keyboard. Finally, I put the mSATA IDE adapter back in, minus the plastic casing, so it would fit, put electrical tape over the two LEDs on that board, and put it all back together.

 

[3lectr1c]

The first keyboard was definitely swapped from a 1st gen iBook, the 2nd gens (like the second image) are much less transparent. I can’t tell exactly which one, it looks too dark to be from a blueberry but that could be just the lighting. Might be a graphite one though.

 

[This Does Not Compute]

My own Lime machine is in storage, but some searching on Google Images suggests that they did indeed have keyboards with (what looks to me like) blue accents. Here are some photos of a boxed machine. Next time I get access to it, I'll snap a photo of the keyboard in mine for comparison.

 

[wottle]

My own Lime machine is in storage, but some searching on Google Images suggests that they did indeed have keyboards with (what looks to me like) blue accents. Here are some photos of a boxed machine. Next time I get access to it, I'll snap a photo of the keyboard in mine for comparison.

Yeah, all the pictures I found online appeared to have the blue lettering shown in my second picture. I'm guessing the yellowed on is the original from the 466MH lime version.

 

[wottle]

The first keyboard was definitely swapped from a 1st gen iBook, the 2nd gens (like the second image) are much less transparent. I can’t tell exactly which one, it looks too dark to be from a blueberry but that could be just the lighting. Might be a graphite one though.

If by "1st gen" you mean the original Tangerine / Blueberry version in 1999, it is definitely not that keyboard (I have a blueberry and the blue is much darker).

So maybe from a 1st gen graphite (SE 366MHz)? That's the one color I'm missing at this point, so it could be they used that color (the darker blue) on the 366MHz SE model (originally only in Graphite), and simply switched the plastics to be more opaque in the 2nd gen models (366MHz/466MHz), without offering matching accent colors.

The translucent keyboard was installed in my second gen, Indigo 366MHz model. It's possible it was swapped from a 1st gen graphite, but I'd be interested if anyone has an Indigo and can confirm what the intended keyboard was for that one.

 

[3lectr1c]

That's what I'd assume then, swapped in from a 366 graphite.

 

[This Does Not Compute]

Here's the keyboard on my 466MHz model. The fn key has a grey-blue color. I have no reason to believe that the keyboard in this unit has ever been swapped, so it seems likely that all Lime models shipped with, effectively, graphite keyboards (which would make sense, as neon green lettering would be difficult to read).