Frankenspeccy

First of all, not really a hack, just a repair job.  

A friend had a ZX Spectrum which had a badly corroded circuit board, and the keyboard membrane had fallen apart. Aesthetically it looked good though.  I had a working Speccy, but it was all cracked and beat up, so basically I did a case-transfusion to make one good, working one. 

My beaten up, but still working old Spectrum

First up, getting the circuit board and keyboard membrane out of the burnt out, but ok looking case..
I took out the 2 remaining screws (who knows where the rest went!?) and opened the lid..

Yeah, that ribbon cable is broken alright.

Next, I removed the screws on the circuit board, and took that out of the case.  It's quite obviously burnt out on the 5 volt regulator.

Burnt out.

Next, I carefully peeled off the metal keyboard overlay, and removed the rubber keys, so that I could get the keyboard membrane out.  The overlay and rubber keys were glued down, so I had to take care not to break them, but they were easy enough to remove.

Keyboardy stuff

I then removed the keyboard membrane, and repeated the process with the doner spectrum.
Then, put the circuit board and keyboard membrane from the working one back in the good case, and carefully put it all back together, taking special care not to break the keyboard membrane when plugging it in on the board.

This is what the ribbon cables are supposed to look like!

Almost done.  It actually looks pretty cool like this! :-)

Finally, I used a tiny bit of glue to stick the keyboard overlay back in place and the job was done..

All done!

And Working!