Stealirose Orange (Hirose Orange clones) are finished! No typing test yet but soon^TM. Here’s some pics.
Pile and Close-Up:
In their future natural habitat:
These bois are smoooooth, and other than the spring there’s no real difference compared to stock Tangerines Rev2. I have no reference to contrast them to the real thing, however if anyone would like to temporarily/permanently donate some Hirose Orange switches so that I could do a comparison I would not be opposed.
Working from home and wanted to change things up a bit.
I had bought some Gat Yellows but for whatever reason, the pcb pegs are too large for any of the pcbs(too lazy to clip) I have on hand. Had some silent Alpacas lying around to try and thought why not mix the two together.
Switch is
I really like em! Feels good and has a very pleasant thock-ish sound on certain plates, currently using a Polypropylne one.
Sound test here(phone mic recording). Temporarily calling them Yellowjackets for the heck of it.
Another irritating thing about the Gateron milky tops, not sure if it’s an issue with different batches or not, but sometimes the part of the keycap that goes into the switch stem will catch on the edge of the top; luckily I had enough spares.
Hi everyone,
On a random and fun note, I’ve cleared time this weekend to do some force curve graphs for different springs. Since I have the time slot and resources ready, feel free to let me know if there is any particular spring or frankenswitch you’d like me to try. I can post the graphs in this thread or a new thread.
I’d love to see a force curve of a stock switch vs that same switch lubed/with pe stems. I’ve always wondered just how much resistance the scratch adds.
If possible a stock Gateron Yellow with a PE stem to see if smoothness makes a measurable difference. I’d also love to see a Gateron Yellow, with PE stems, & 68g slow curved spring if possible! I know the second request is a bit of a pain so no biggie if you can’t do that, but I’d be highly appreciative if you could do the first request. Anyways a huge thanks for taking suggestions on what to test! 
I’m actually pretty curious about how springs influence tactile bumps myself - it might be neat to do a grid of 9 with three housings, stems, and springs - maybe a light one, a heavy one, and some kind of graduated one.
I’d be very interested in seeing a centralized source that lists components of the most common (eventually getting into odd combos) of frankenswitches. I remeber seeing a google sheet on discord in one of server channels pinned, but I don’t know if it is being actively maintained.
I’m just trying to find a spring that closely resembles the spring of the Gateron Yellow.
The r/switchmodders discord has one, but it’s not extremely extensive, most are custom combos.
The general pattern seems to be that “heaver spring = less tactile”.
My theory is that what we perceive as tactility is the sensation of suddenly changing the force that’s against your finger + accompanying secondary vibration. A heavier spring counteracts the decrease in force that results from coming off of the tactile bump. That is, the change in force when coming off the back of the bump is less, resulting in a diminished sense of tactility.
Look into TX Keyboard and Sprit “slow curve” springs.
Hard agree with what you’re saying here. To me, a tactile fan, the size of a tactile bump is always measured as a proportionality to the resistance of the spring at that bump point. For lighter springs, this bump can be incredibly significant: to demonstrate I’ll paraphrase Zeal’s findings from his 62g Zealios (shared in his discord).
The spring resistance right before the bump is (by his measurements), is somewhere between 35-40g. The bump itself is approximately 60g of resistance. So, in the moment of the tactile event, the resistance experienced almost immediately raises by 50-57%!
If we assume 0-5g of resistance from the housing (which Zeal has mentioned many other times, and should be consistent regardless of the spring weight), that means 35g of the resistance prior to the bump comes from the spring itself and at minimum 20g of the resistance is coming from the bump itself. That pure-bump resistance shouldn’t change depending on the springs, so we can (probably) use that as a fair baseline for what the pure-bump resistance is for a Zealio stem in the other weight variants.
If we go up to the heavier Zealios on offer, we can then think about that in a couple of different ways:
In the first case, the proportion of pure-bump resistance(20g) to pre-bump spring + housing resistance is as follows: (keeping in mind that 62g Zealios have a proportionate increase of 50-57%)
In the second case, the proportion would be as follows:
Of course, all of this is based around Zeal’s own measurements with his own switches and it’s a lot of armchair math on my part, but it’d be interesting to collate data (imo) on the bump resistance of various stems and pre-bump resistances of various switches/frankenswitches and see how much that matches up to folks’ notions of how tactile those switches are.
I’ve tried some 63.5 slow curve springs and it feels off. Imo it didn’t feel like exactly like gat yellow. it wasn’t just a heavier weight idk how to explain all the feelings about the differences.
Indeed! I think you guys are right about that.
I think it was Halo Trues that first got me thinking about this. That stem can make for some crazy tactile frankenswitches, but the True’s tactility feels pretty mild, and definitely more mild than the Clear - and the only difference there is a spring that gets a lot heavier as you press down.
Especially with the True, that force you feel approaching the bottom of the switch is much stronger than the peak force of the bump. Compare that with something like a Box Jade or Royal, where the peak force of the bump is stronger than the bottom-out force of the spring - ultra tactile!
I think it would be cool to see some of those relationships represented with some bracketed sets and graphs. Might be cool to overlay force-curves where only one component has changed… hm. I feel as though I may be on the precipice of a very deep rabbit-hole…
Super cool analysis! I was talking on Discord recently about measuring switches in terms of additional metrics like “total work to actuate” and “peak tactile force”. I like the idea of “tactility ratio” which is these numbers you’re computing.
Found another awesome switch combo: NK Cream housing, Holy Clear GSUS stem, Everglide Oreo spring, and spring lubed with Hoppes #9 oil. Has a bit more low end thock compared to a Holy Panda switch. Lots of good tactility.
Halo + Cream is pretty well known, Zambumon called them “Pacos” and the name stuck after Taeha Types popularized it on stream.
But what the heck is a “Holy Clear GSUS” stem? Is that some other switch made by the GSUS guy?
That is actually a really good questions. I purchased the Holy Clear GSUS switches from r/mm. What I did was pull the stem from these switches.
My best guess would be a GSUS housing and a halo clear stem. But that guess is coming from teamlinear so your mileage may vary.
Yeah, it very well could be a Halo True stem.
