Yesterday the Enter key on my Leopold FC900R stopped responding accurately. If I hit it harder, it worked fine, but in general it missed entries. I cleaned the keyboard surrounding the key, blew into the switch, blew around the switch, but nothing fixed it. I ordered a new keyboard, the Dragon K671. The Dragon K671 behaves a bit differently and is definitely louder. It also has RGB lighting that needs to be turned off (there fortunately is a profile that disables it). However, despite its cheap price (it's 1/5th of the price of the Leopold FC900R) it came with a lot more pieces, including four spare keys. Since I now had spare keys, I wondered if I could fix my enter key on the Leopold that way.
A quick search told me the Leopold keyboard wasn't hot-swappable, but I do have a soldering iron and the Leopold FC900R only had 3 screws (one hidden under the OK sticker). After removing the screws and lifting the tabs all around the edge, the keyboard, and the dust, became visible. The USB plug needed to be undone from the inside still, and after that it was just a matter of figuring out which of the soldering points was the Enter key. The holes that are soldered through are very large, which makes desoldering a breeze. No wick is needed, you can just use the trusted suction device and soon the pins are floating freely in the PCB. Turning t he keyboard around and wiggling a screwdriver under the switch removes it, and after that it is just a matter of putting one of the Red Dragon keys in place, and soldering it. It worked immediately, so now I have two working keyboards, which isn't intentional but it is nice.
Of course, the Red Dragon switch is red, and the Leopold 900R has blue switches, but I doubt this matters for the enter key specifically. If it was any of the other keys it probably would caused some issues.
