Fixing small plastic... things

[Josh Dersch]

Hi all --

Got myself a Friden 1162 desktop calculator.  This is from about 1968-69 
and has a neat-O keen CRT display and uses a magnetorestrictive delay 
line memory.  Kinda cool.

Mine has taken a fair amount of abuse over the years, and is currently 
not working properly -- at the moment it powers up (with nominal 
voltages, etc) and displays a normal display of all zeros, but as soon 
as a key is depressed, the screen goes blank and never returns.

The 1162 has a rather interesting keyboard encoding mechanism (you can 
see a decent overview of the device & the keyboard mechanism here: 
http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/friden1162.html)  Close investigation 
of the keyboard mechanism on my specimen reveals that a few of the 
plastic "fingers" that are positioned on the rods that move the magnets 
to/away from the reed switches have snapped off.

I have a close up picture of what the fingers are supposed to look like at:

http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/friden/normal-finger.JPG

And a picture of one of the broken ones at:

http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/friden/broken-finger.JPG

The broken fingers no longer make contact with the mechanism, and so a 
couple of the reed switches do not get activated properly.  I'm guessing 
that this is at least part of the reason the machine is acting the way 
that it is (that it's getting unexpected scancodes from the keyboard and 
going off into the weeds...)

I need to figure out how to "recap" these fingers.  I don't have a lot 
of experience repairing plastic stuff like this, anyone have any 
suggestions?

Thanks!
Josh