I finally got ahold of the KB-101A I've been searching for ever since I found out it existed from a post I had seen on DT in the past (viewtopic.php?t=17961). I remember actually asking twin_roto if I could trade my acer branded kb-101A for his board, but he rightfully declined. Anyway, a year a half later, I've finally got one I can call my own!
The Story---------------------------
The story of this one is pretty uneventful. I saw it on eBay, I bid like $700 or something stupid in the last few seconds, and I won it for around $330! That's....that's the whole story.
The Restoration---------------------------
The board was actually in pretty good condition to begin with. The caps just needed to be bathed in soapy water. The switches were slightly scratchy though so I went ahead and desoldered the whole thing to clean the switches - then I figured "why stop there?" and went ahead and painted the plate a contrasting color.
The most annoying and frustrating part of this whole restoration was testing it. When I was soldering the switches back into the board, I had flowed too much solder onto one of the enter pins. As such, that particular pin was soldered into an adjacent pad (that I still have no idea what it was). The consequence of this was somehow not allowing spacebar to register - so when I went to test the board I couldn't use spacebar. This turned what should have been an hour soldering/testing job into a 4 hour ordeal that pretty much ruined my day. I am glad I finally figured out what was going on, though... it still pissed me off nonetheless...
The Board---------------------------
Gonna let the pictures do most of the talking. Since the multitech version of the board predates the acer branded version, the caps are Alps Electric Doubleshot (AE DS) caps! These types of caps are probably my favorite caps to use with blue alps as well, so I'm pretty happy - especially considered they aren't too yellowed either! Definitely shined a bit, though.
Anyway, enjoy the pictures and thanks for reading!
