Fixing the scroll wheel on a SteelSeries Rival 310

595 words, estimated reading time: 3 minute(s)
Originally published on September 14, 2024
Last modified on September 14, 2024

If you’ve been using a computer mouse for a while, you might get an issue where the scroll wheel moves randomly, jumps around while scrolling or at times doesn’t respond at all. My mouse also developed this issue recently, but luckily it’s very easy to fix. The only thing that happens is various gunk builds up on the wheel sensor and this causes misreadings, so obviously cleaning up that gunk makes the wheel work like new again. Here I’ll show how I did that on my mouse, but the general idea applies to any mouse.

What you need

No matter what, you’ll need the following:

• A mouse
• Corresponding screwdriver(s) - In 99% (if not 100%) of cases a Phillips #1 will be enough
• Some way to remove the gunk: toothbrush and/or blowing
• A working brain cell

If the screws are hidden under the mouse feet (like in my case), you might also want to have a hairdryer or hot air station together with a sharp object to remove the feet without damaging them. To do this, heat up the feet (on low heat, obviously; I used 100C as that’s the least my hot air station can do) until you can no longer touch them, then pry them away with the sharp object. I don’t think I did the best job at this, but I was able to reapply them acceptably well after the repair.

Fixing the mouse

First, for reference, I’ll throw in a picture of the mouse:

After removing the feet, the screws become visible:

Here you can see why I said I didn’t do the best job of removing the feet: some glue remains on the mouse. I’m quite sure that after a perfect removal it would all be on the feet and this would allow them to be reapplied perfectly, but as I said I was able to do so well enough IMO.

After unscrewing the 4 screws revealed under the feet, the bottom and top halves of the mouse come apart easily. From there I was able to take a look at the scroll wheel assembly, and there sure was something to see:

To get to the scroll wheel in this case, I had to unscrew that LED BOARD, take it out of the wheel (which took a few seconds) and then unscrew the entire mainboard from the chassis. Once that is done, I attacked both the wheel and the sensor with a toothbrush and blown air and then gave the rest of the mouse a much needed clean while at it. This picture of the area under the board gives a good idea of how dirty the mouse was:

Once I cleaned that up somewhat, putting the 2 boards and then 2 halves of the chassis back in place was pretty easy. To test the mouse, I screwed in 2 of the chassis screws diagonally, plugged the mouse into my PC and hoped everything would work, which it did. After the other 2 screws came reapplying the feet; because I had not removed them perfectly, they didn’t seem to pop back in well. I worked around this by pressing them against with the chassis with the sharp object, and as I have already said this gave an acceptable result.

Conclusion

With that, the mouse was back in full order. One issue I didn’t fix yet is the side panels ungluing after a liquid accident long ago, but I doubt that’s worth describing.

I hope that in the future I will be able to write about repairs of more complex devices.