Cleaning a mechanical keyboard: Corsair Vengeance K70

You noticed your keyboard has dirt, some keys are stuck, some keys are not registering properly …or maybe you just spilled some coffee on your keyboard. What do you do now?
The answer is plain and simple: clean it. Here’s how to clean a Corsair Vengeance K70.

The Corsair Vengeance K70 comes with Cherry MX Red key switches, ten contoured buttons for gaming, anti-ghosting, adjustable back-lighting, multimedia controls and even a detachable wrist rest. For those of you not familliar with what I am talking about, this is a Corsair Vengeance K70:

Cleaning the keyboard

Here’s what you will need in order to clean the K70 (this also applies to other mechanical keyboards too):

1. Paper towels
2. Ear buds
3. Warm water

Some people might recommend some canned air or an air compressor, but in my opinion, they’re not necessary.

To start off with the cleaning of your keyboard, take a picture of the keyboard and then remove all of the keys using a keycap puller or, if you do not have one, remove all of the keys one by one manually. Be very careful when removing larger keycaps, they usually have their own stabilizers. Some keyboards come with a wire stabilizer for larger buttons, but this isn’t the case with the K70.

Here’s how Corsair’s Cherry MX Red switches look like when the keyboard is dirty:

The keys don’t look all too pretty when the keyboard is dirty either:

In order to clean the dust and dirt between the switches and on the keys, take some ear buds, pour some warm water on them and sweep the dirt away. Do the same with the keys. Repeat the process until you clean the switches and the keys. Be sure to clean the whole keyboard plate. You can also clean the keys using warm water and some dishwashing soap. The switches, when clean, should look something like this:

After you have cleaned the switches and the keycaps, lay out all of the keycaps on a paper towel and leave them to dry. Do not use a hair dryer – the heat coming out of it might cause harm to the keycaps (it might cause the keycaps to bend).

Final touch – reinstating the keycaps

In order to bring the keyboard back to its former shape, use the snapshot you took earlier to reinstall all the keys into their former positions. After you’ve successfully done that, you’re pretty much done. Here’s how the keyboard should look like now: