Pulling the Datanetics keyswitches from an old keyboard takes time and skill. You have to suck the solder from the holes/pins, before unscrewing the switch or you could pull the switch apart or the pin out of the switch.

After pulling about 40 switches, I noticed that my spring operated solder sucker wasn’t sucking much solder anymore. I should have noticed sooner, as the solder was getting harder and harder to get out, until finally the solder sucker refused to operate at all. At that point, I knew it wasn’t working right. I took it all apart, got as much solder out of the tube, as I could and even oiled the tube with a plastic compatible oil. I reassembled and operation returned to as good as new, maybe better. The improvement was so vast, that the last 10 switches took as long to get out, as the previous 2. Moral of the story, proper maintenance of your solder sucker will prevent vast amount of frustration.

Also, the screws holding many of the switches onto the PCB were extremely hard to get out. I had to file the head on an 00 phillips screw driver to exactly fit the profile of the screws or I wouldn’t have been able to get some of them out, at all. I’m not sure what the moral is here, other than phillips heads screws suck.