So we had a little accident today. I went for a cup of tea, returned to my office and placed the cup on my desk. However, I've then managed to mess up since, by placing the cup in an unbalanced position, I unwillingly became the first element in an avalanche of destructive events that turned up to be OK, after all, since they've led to the idea of writing this particular guide.

So first the cup entered a somewhat stable rotation around the bottom Z axis. It kept rotating until a certain angle was reached. We'll call that angle alpha. Now angle alpha was really problematic. Why? Because alpha was defined by the direct contact between the top border of the cup. This is what lead the cup to a halt and transformed the variable alpha angle into a devastating constant.

Alpha was more than enough so that approx. 78.538% of the tea content to get spilled from the cup. As you might know, Murphy's laws dictate that in such an event, the target of the respective liquid is the most precious object which can end up damaged when coming in contact with it. As you might have guessed, Murphy got it right most of the times (yes, in this case to).

So after a short period of harsh language and ironic jokes, the team and I decided that cleaning the keyboard would be fun. So we began taking a few pictures while dismantling the thing. By the way, you might want to place some water absorbing material under the upside down keyboard since liquid will still poor from the bowls of the device. After unscrewing the back of the keyboard, try and remove the backplate. In our case things got a little aggressive because the damn thing just wouldn't come off. Some rigid plastic clams were at fault.

Note that it is a good idea to turn your keyboard upside down and give it a few good hakes so that very few amounts of liquid actually remain within the keyboard.

The first thing you will notice is that most of the liquid spread over something which looks like a silicone membrane. What you need to do is carefully take it out (it will come out very easy) so that no extra liquid is spilled into other parts of the keyboard. After washing it under warm (not hot) or cold water, hang it out to dry somewhere. It is good to have another person help you with other parts, since letting the keyboard stay for a long time unattended might lead to the spreading of liquid among other parts as well.

At this point, you should be left with the plastic keys and the front frame itself. These are actually no problem, since you can easily wash them with soap and water. So by now you should be pretty much done with the front side of the keyboard. Let's go on with the backside.

Things become more delicate here since this part contains most of the necessary circuitry that is used to send signals from the keyboard to the PC. You'll notice a brown small rectangular shaped board with 3 (green) LEDs. That is the keyboard controller, the most important part of the entire keyboard. You can look at it like a very limited, small CPU. If that gets ruined by the liquid, then you can just stop right now and go out to purchase another keyboard. But if it's still intact, you can go on by removing the metal plate spreading across the entire keyboard length.

In most cases (except if you spilled an entire 1L bottle of Coke on the device), little liquid should have made it to this area. In case it did, just use a wet cloth to gently wipe the circuit-engraved thin plastic sheet. You can even try and remove the controller to clean the bottom frame in a worse case scenario, but things might get tricky because the circuits integrated in the plastic sheet are linked to the controller and screwing them up will surely mess up any chance you've got of making the keyboard work again.

In the end, after washing everything, just let all the components dry for six to seven hours (maybe even let it dry over the night) and try to remember how everything fits in when it comes time to reassemble everything.