Just bought some U4T stems and 62g springs from Gazzew for this very reason. Not quite as tactile as the U4T Bobas, but they feel pretty good and gives me a reason to use my Brown housings.
I also have a set of desoldered Cherry browns that I’ve been looking to put to good use. Current thought is to polish down the bump (using diamond paste) to see if curvy (swervy? definitely not scurvy) linear feels good or not.
I would try and find a way to convert the keyboard with a Soarer’s or something similar, that looks to be a well-built board, and it’d be a shame to see it go unused.
However, I would try and put some new switches in there. Sell the vint blacks and see how some Durock POMs, U4 Thocks, or Box Whites perform in there!
Yep, that’s pretty much my plan. I’m gonna harvest the vint blacks for a future build then replace them with a modern linear switch & USB convert the board. I almost want to leave the switches in it, but I know they’ll get much more use from me if I harvest them & put them into a build. The Wyse will definitely get rebuilt for use though.
Your naming scheme for The Switch Kitchen is just amazing. Like I keep rereading the names because of how good they are.
Ha, thanks so much! I do have fun with that.
You’re going with an Olivia theme all the way down huh? I saw the post about the metal hihihi key too
Yes! It will be Olivia dark alphas though so a little deviance from pure Olivia I suppose.
I passed up Olivia Dark cause I was more interested in GMK Blackpink. Really shot myself in the foot there…
Well, that was absolutely worth it.
Lubed everything with 205g0 (rails, stabs, pcb) and dome swapped the original 45g HHKB domes with some 45g Leopold FC980C domes (I don’t know why, but the Leopold domes feel slightly heavier and slightly more tactile than the HHKB domes). It sounds good and feels soooo much better. I’ll line it up with some foam when I wake up later this morning.
This is something many others have said as well. While it doesn’t make any sense for Topre to provide Leopold with custom domes over their regular 45g domes, there is definitely some difference between them. I know the fact Leopold 660/980Cs having a steel plate & the HHKB having an ABS plate plays into that weighting feel difference some, but probably not enough to cause almost everyone who tries both to say Leo domes feel heavier.
Also I would say the Leopold domes are heavier even when comparing to a Realforce with uniform 45g domes, which should be the exact same feel as a Leopold Topre board (both share the steel plate & very similar construction beyond form factor). No concrete evidence has ever surfaced of the regular 45g Topre domes & the 45g Leopold domes being different , but IMHO all signs point to some difference.
Maybe the spring under the dome is different?
I did a blind test with the domes, no springs under them, and 10/10 times the ones that felt heavier and more tactile were the Leopold ones, like it was very noticeable. Maybe it’s because the Leopold domes are like 2+ years old compared to the HHKB ones? No idea, but I’m glad I’m not the only one that has noticed the difference!
The general explanation is that the Leopold boards made in China have more tactile domes than the ones made in Japan.
I don’t know if this is true, but at least anecdotally the domes on my older 660C are more tactile than the domes on my newish 980C even though they are both considered 45g domes.
The domes came from a “Made in Japan” FC980C, unless the Chinese ones are even more tactile than the Japanese ones.
Lubing topre sliders is always 100% worth it