Toughbook CF-27 Keyboard connector broken

Hi guys,
It's a long story. To cut it (this bit) short, a newbie goes disassembling his toughbook, and does everything completely wrong, and breaks parts, and whilst replacing the broken parts, through his carelessness he breaks even more.

My latest victim is the keyboard connector. All I wanted to do was put back the antenna lead in its proper place. I kinda have the connector wedged back into place, but a few keys don't work (super key, ctrl and alt) and fn is dependant on wiggling a cable. The last time this happened, a quick spray of isopropyl alcohol seemed to sort it out. Nope. Not this time. Actually I'm not quite sure if it helped or not, because I did take out all the connectors and put them back in, so one of them could have been misaligned or something.

So last night I simply put the antenna connector back. Easy. The keyboard probably got pulled around a bit, because I didn't disconnect it. I then booted it back up, not realising that keys were dead. It's annoying because I cant open tabs on firefox and use ctrl+c etc on the linux terminal. I wondered why firefox was not responding to ctrl+t.

I realised that there was the dead keys this morning when I tried super+t for the terminal. Nothing happened. So I took the keyboard out, and reconnected it several times, and kept doing it, trying to get the keys to work. After doing it several times, I broke the little brown thing on the connector, well actually its the little white bits that poke out to hold the brown bit into place. I am able to use the keyboard with a bit of cut-up credit card style plastic underneath, and a bit of electrical tape to hold it into place.

Anybody able to give me a bit of advice on fixing the keyboard problems, it's totally confuzzled me. Thanks guys.

Edit:
It seems to be the keyboard, as both cables are firmly held in place, however I have no means of testing other than asking my sister to push as hard as she can onto the connector, and me waving the keyboard around looking to see when the FN light goes out.

 

I don't know if you figured out the wedge in the connector trick yourself or if you found the information here. We have been over this a few times and you are on the right track. The only fix is to cobble up some sort of way to securely hold the cable in place. I am assuming there is no damage to the cables themselves from all the handling. Good luck!
CAP

 

I found most of the info here, after breaking the little "ears" that hold the brown wedge in place, and thought to myself "I wonder how many other people had this issue, stupid plastic piece of....", and decided to go onto the marvellous invention we call the internet, and funnily enough I saw the "Any fix for broken keyboard connector on 28?" thread at the top of the google search, and picked out bits from that.

I think that I've probably broke the keyboard, as I've been working on getting it working for a good five hours now, and no progress has been made to prove to me that the connector is still broken, and funnily enough if my sister holds the connector in place, and I wiggle the keyboard around it works and then doesn't work. The keyboard was probably broken in te firt place thinking about it now.

I suppose I've learnt for next time now, there's a few cheap(ish) keyboards on ebay, and I might treat my toughbook to the emissive keyboard, as an apology for breaking it so much. My "new(got in jan, almost unused)" toughbook is kinda on its last legs now anyways... I shouldn't be allowed anywhere near them!