"Cursitor Doom" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 27 Dec 2015 09:04:26 -0800, John Heath wrote:

Try cleaning the rubber bubble carbon and PC board with alcohol and cue
tip. Works for remote controls most of the time. Failing this buy the
remote control rebuild kits , around 20 bucks , that will resurface the
carbon on the rubber bubble. Good luck with it and I suspect you will be
okay with the easy fix of alcohol and a cue tip.

Thanks, John. I'm really loathed to throw this old friend out. Babies as
yet unborn when this was shipped to me have grown into men and gone out
and died fighting for the Queen in Afghanistan before this calculator
ever started to fail - and it's had some hard use, I can tell you. Makes
you think, doesn't it? :-/

With the conductive rubber backed buttons, I've got away with shaving a
sliver of it from a scrap button strip and sticking it on with RTV silicone
sealant.

The one that failed on the PVR remote was the right arrow button from
constantly scrolling through the EPG. Cleaning didn't help, and the
conductive rubber bit looked perfectly OK - but the grafted on replacement
did the trick.

Sometimes the contact pads on the PCB have overlaid screen printed link
tracks of some kind of carbon filled resin - these can be damaged by
solvents when cleaning them!

Some older calculators had the "popper" style button contacts - replacements
for those can be salvaged from some makes of disposable cameras.