If you've ever upgraded a Lombard or Pismo Apple G3 PowerBook, you know how to pop the keyboard off -- cool, huh? Wanna try popping the individual keys off?

I do not recommend doing any of this. In fact, I recommend against it; consider it a gedankenexperiment or an autopsy for a dead computer. You may irreperably damage your hardware and void your warranty. This is merely a description of my experience. [Much later and wiser note: in fact, you can really break an aluminum PowerBook if you try this.]

The keyboard is a circuit-board on an aluminum bed. The board is kept cozy by a layer of tough black plastic and a latex dust-attractor. You can pop a key off by lifting carefully on the top corners with your fingernails, and you can see how each

Each key covers a latex nipple which protects the pressure-sensor and works as a conical-flex spring. Above each nipple on either side are sockets with tiny east-west holes, into which fit the pins on the sides of the tips of a U-shaped white plastic thingy. The U hugs a similar O-shaped thingy, which can pivot inside it and tucks into to the base at the bottom. Since they're joined fairly loosely, they can lift up like a car-jack. Their loose ends (U at the bottom, O at the top) click into sockets in the bottom of the key:

                ____
           x|  /    \  |x  U connects to base
            |x|      |x|   U connects to O
            |  \_xx_/  |   O connects to base
             \________/

You can pop white plastic scissor-hinges out by squeezing the top and pulling towards you.

The spacebar is trickier. It has two O-U scissors, but only one nipple; it's held even by a stiff wire running along the top and tucking in at the bottom. Be sure to tuck the wire in when you replace it (I didn't, and bruised an important flange). My spacebar leans almost imperceptibly to the right because the left scissor squishes against the lump where the black sheet folds under -- probably also because I tend to hit the spacebar with my right thumb. This could be fixed (or cancelled out, anyway) by twisting the wire counterclockwise, but it won't be worth it for another quarter-million strokes or until the black layer's glue starts to give.