Restore Old Keyboard: How to Bleach Keyboards Back To Being White

Hi everyone!

I was visiting an office a couple months back that used to be a dentist office. In the attic, we found a bunch of VERY old computer equipment. I’m fairly young so this felt like an archaeological dig.

I managed to salvage a Key Tronic keyboard with the model number E03418201D. Some of the writing on the back label is in German as well! It also had a Dell Enhanced Keyboard sticker on it.

The thing is a beauty!

However, it suffered from very yellowed plastic. Probably from smoke or UV exposure. So lets clean that thing up.

The first thing I tried was putting the keys into a jar with water and sodium bicarbonate. This involved periodically mixing the solution to make sure all the sodium didn’t settle to the bottom and putting the jar in direct sunlight. From what I understand, the sodium reacts with the UV light from the sun and produces Ozone gas which whitens the plastic.

I wouldn’t recommend the sodium bicarbonate method as I didn’t have very good results with it 😔

Okay, so I moved onto using Hydrogen Peroxide. This stuff us tough to find on it’s own however, you can use hair lightener instead. I used Bblonde 40vol/12% cream peroxide.

Lets jump into it

This is what the keyboard looked like when I first brought it home. I was in love immediately…