I love my Logitech Cordless Wave keyboard. Almost as much as I love the Das Keyboard Model S Pro I use at work. (Thank you Crown for letting me keep it!)

But, sadly, the mouse that goes with my wave keyboard had lost the ability to middle click.

This morning, I was researching gVIM plugins, because that’s how I roll when my family’s away at reunion. (Well that and this, I suppose…) Anyway, this involved a lot of opening new tabs, which my hand tries to do automatically by middle-clicking. This poor mouse had been slowly middle-clicking worse and worse until today, it was only working one out of every 10 tries or so…it was very frustrating!

Yesterday, I got my father’s day gift from Amy and the kids. I’m forbidden from opening the envelopes that say “open on Sunday”, “open on Monday”, etc., but I was allowed to open my main present (Amy knows I don’t do waiting well…) It was an awesome t-shirt and permission to buy myself something nice for $10!

Well, $10 isn’t quite enough to go out and buy myself a new mouse, but it WAS enough to go and buy a soldering iron. Between that and the $4 of my blow money I threw in on my own, I had enough to buy the soldering iron and some nice, thin solder.

I came home, desoldered the broken switch I had found inside the mouse and soldered in a new one that I had in my salvaged parts bin. Unfortunately, this led to another problem since my new switch was about an eighth of an inch taller than the original, so a small plastic peg on the plastic enclosure no longer fit correctly. One trip to the tool closet out back and a minute of loud whirring noise and I and my trusty not-dremmel rotary tool were able to relieve that peg of it’s unneeded extra height…

Of course, at this point I had no idea if I had hosed the mouse by dinking around where I didn’t belong, but, I had a spare wireless mouse upstairs that I could have switched to if I had to (I just like this one better, so it’s worth the work to try to fix it!)

Lo and behold, after screwing it all back together it still works and I have a functioning middle click. And it’s a bit heftier button, to boot!

All told, a fun way to spend my morning. Thanks for the awesome presents, Amy, Ethan, Audrey and Isaac!