Hardware
Mechanical Keyboards
Three boards, each built from parts rather than bought assembled. On the last two, all 171 switches were taken apart and lubricated by hand before they went in.
- Built
- 3 boards
- Current
- Wooting 80HE
- Switches
- Owlab Ti HE
- Keycaps
- PBT doubleshot
- Switches lubed
- 171 by hand, 87 + 84
- Parts brushed
- 684, four per switch
- Lubricant
- Krytox 205g0
- Second board
- Built, then sold
The first board was cheap and deliberately so. PCB, case and keycaps all came off Shopee, and the Cherry Red switches were the only named part in it. It was the board that taught me what the parts were and what each one changes.
The second was the first serious one: an aluminium TKL from Akko on a gasket mount, Gateron Cap Golden Yellow V2 switches, keycaps again from Shopee. It was also the first board I lubricated. I later sold it to a friend.
The board in the photograph is the current one. A Wooting 80HE with Owlab Ti HE switches and PBT doubleshot keycaps. The switches are Hall effect, so actuation is read as a magnetic field rather than by two pieces of metal touching.
What I would rather be judged on than the parts list is the lubricating. 87 switches on the Akko and 84 on the Wooting - 171 in total, every one of them taken apart by hand. A switch separates into four pieces: upper housing, lower housing, spring and stem. Each piece is brushed with Krytox 205g0 on its own. That is 684 parts, one brush at a time.
It is slow and it is repetitive and there is no way to make it interesting. It also has to be done in one sitting per board, because the amount you put on drifts as you get faster at it, and a board lubricated across two evenings feels different from one side to the other.
Nothing about it is technically difficult. It is the same small motion 684 times, done carefully enough that every switch gets the same amount. That is the part of these builds I actually care about, and it is the reason the last two feel the way they do rather than the way the first one did.