Trackball button gone a tad kerflooey

May 6, 2012 5:46 PM

Left button on trackball gone a bit wonky, is there a fix before I buy a new one?

I like my Logitech Trackman Marble but I seem to go through them too often, every couple years, and I'm tired of it. This time the problem is the left mouse button: it seems to want to double click instead of single, stop selecting mid-drag, or not selecting at all. The last time something similar happened I thought it might be the cord coming loose, so I tried opening it and reseating the cord a bit better, only to have it stop working completely. So I'd like to have a good idea what to do before opening it up. Searching on the web brought up the idea of somehow purchasing a replacement button, but I have no idea how one would do that. Any ideas on repairing this, or should I suck it up and get a new one again?

posted by waraw to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Do you have a soldering iron? If you open it up and post some pictures, I could walk you through replacing the button. Although I offer no guarantees that this will solve your problem. Other things could be wrong.

If reseating the cord made it stop working, then you probably disconnected one of the wires while adjusting it, which could also be fixed with a soldering iron.

Just a thought though, if there is a bad connection somewhere, I wonder if you could pull out the circuitry from any of the casing bits and bake it for a while to get the solder to melt and reform the connections... I'm not going to go so far as to suggest that you do this, but maybe someone else can weigh in on the idea.
posted by keeo at 7:16 PM on May 6, 2012

Do you have the older ones? Could you try replacing the button? Otherwise, if you do get another, keep this one for helping fix/replace the next problem.
posted by caclwmr4 at 7:43 PM on May 6, 2012

I've opened up trackballs before to have the switches under the button replaced by someone who knows how to solder. Once I had the right-side and left-side switches swapped because I rarely used the right one. Another time I got a replacement part cheap by buying an old mouse from a computer surplus store. There are always a ton of old mice at surplus places; it should be the standard part that's in all trackballs and mice unless Logitech did something fancy. They usually look like this (the black ones on top): http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathancharles/1512538948/
posted by girlhacker at 10:37 PM on May 6, 2012

I've had that exact flakiness with the mousebutton occur with my old TrackMan Wheel. Careful investigation eventually showed it was caused by the nub of the switch wearing out a neat little trough in the contacting plastic on the underside of the button, causing the switch not do depress fully. Attempts to patch the button with tape and epoxy worked for a while, but I eventually got bored with patching, and just bought a new one.
posted by HFSH at 1:39 AM on May 7, 2012

I'd lift it slightly and spray with WD-40.
posted by devnull at 2:00 AM on May 7, 2012

You can open it up and spray the button out with electronics/tuner/contact cleaner. That's what fixes those kinds of buttons pretty much every time, for me.

Take it apart, remove circuit board, go outside, spray the switch out, click it a bunch of times, spray it again, click it a bunch of times, spray it again. Let it dry overnight. (You don't strictly have to wait overnight, but the button won't feel right until it dries out completely.)
posted by gjc at 5:01 AM on May 7, 2012