Restore Your Original Gameboy Bumper Buttons To Factory
In this guide we will be discussing how to restore your original bumper buttons on your Gameboy.
This guide uses strong chemicals that CAN and WILL cause problems if they are not treated carefully.
If you are apprehensive about using such chemicals, you can follow this guide using only Isopropyl Alcohol and DeoxIT.
Required Items For This Project:
- TarnX
- Isopropyl Alcohol
- Water
- DeoxIT
- Nylon Brush
To tell how dirty our button actually are we are going to use a multimeter into determine the ohms while the button is pressed. Ours had one button reading roughly 500ohms while the other button read 250ohms. A clean button should be reading as close to zero as possible.
To begin to restore the buttons we will need to remove the rubber portions of the buttons, this will allow the chemicals to make their way deeper into the button. The rubber pieces simply just pull out.
Once we've got them taken out, we should clean them while we are at it. We soak them in isopropyl alcohol and then blast them with compressed air to clean them.
We dilute our TarnX with a 50/50 mix of water. This is to help ensure that we don't destroy the console with how powerful the chemical is.
You can also pour your chemicals into cups and dip the areas of the board with each bumper button and audio jack into the cups instead of squirting the liquids into the console.
Next we are going to insert TarnX into the buttons, we used a syringe for this. We then gently shook the board to allow the chemicals to work down deeper into the button. This is followed by blowing out any remaining TarnX with the air compressor after 30 seconds.
Make sure not to leave the TarnX in the buttons for too long as it can and will destroy the buttons. You should have your air and water prepared to quickly transition to the next step.
After you have blown out any remaining TarnX you can then pour water into the bumper buttons to help flush out any remnants TarnX that may still be there, make sure not to get the rest of the board wet. That will also get blown out with the compressed air.
The water shouldn't contact any other part of the board besides the areas affected by TarnX. If it does, completely dry those areas. Ensure your console is entirely dry before reassembly.
We follow the water up with isopropyl alcohol, this will help displace any remaining water as well. We spray the alcohol into the buttons and let it sit before blowing it out just like the other steps. We do two alcohol cycles to make sure everything is really clean and free of TarnX.
After our two cycles of alcohol we will move onto our final step of DeoxIT. DeoxIT will act as a final coating to help protect the newly treated metal. It follows the same steps as the rest of the restoration, spray it in and then blow it back out.
Now that we have finished restoring the buttons, we can reinsert the newly cleaned rubber portions of the button and do one final test to see how clean the buttons are now.
Our final testing shows that our buttons are practically brand new once again. They are reading essentially zero ohms instead of the 250 ohms that they were before.
The exact same trick can be applied to the audio jack of the console, the only difference is we brush the metal to make sure it's nice and clean. So first we hit it TarnX for thirty seconds. We then use our brush to help get any oxidation off.
This is blown out and followed by water just like the bumper buttons.
After the water is blown out we will hit the whole area with isopropyl alcohol to help remove any remaining water. While we are at it, we will turn the volume slider up and down a few times while it's coated in alcohol to help clean it.
Finally we will hit it with our protective layer of DeoxIT.
Now all you have to do is make sure your console is entirely dry before reassembling.
