Rosewill RK-6000 (Clone Blue Alps) Teardown

[nuclearsandwich]

Finals are over and I finally have the time to play with some of the keyboards I've been amassing this semester.

Since I've built an ergodox and a pair of Butterfly keypads, I decided that my first project for the summer should be a teardown instead of a build. I also wanted to get some practice desoldering and removing an Alps board as I have a few of them that need a lot of work and I wanted to practice on a replaceable board rather than a vintage one.

The Rosewill RK-6000 "Striker" (Amazon US) is a $40 mechanical which uses clicky Alps clone switches.

The RK-6000 would be a decent budget mech if not for two things. For a start, the layout has all a 1x backspace and a big J shaped enter key. The left modifiers are standard winkey but all the right modifiers are 1x to make room for the context menu key. Secondly, the blue Alps clones have an almost imperceptible tactility and a really muffled click when typing at any real speed. This board doesn't have the same "crunch" sensation I felt with quiet Matias switches which went away after a while but it doesn't feel good either. Sadly, this makes my initial reason for purchasing the board: as a switch donor for some blue Alps clones, kind of poopy because the switches aren't all that spectacular. They feel a bit better than the Ducky XM Alps clones but again, if you actuate fast enough you don't feel or hear much of anything so there's no real point in comparing them when just fooling around with the switches.

Case disassembly required no screwdrivers as there are only three plastic tabs connecting the top and bottom of the case.
The three tabs are visible behind the cable trough and I used the blunt end of a bamboo skewer to push the tabs open and the spudger that comes with a QFR topcase to keep the case separate while I worked the other tabs free. This was waaaay more effort than screws would have been.

Lousy tabs:


After the tabs were off the top case came right off. The PCB and plate were not fixed in any way to the bottom case. It's just clamped there by the two cases.

The USB cable is internally detachable and weirdly so is the controller board.

USB cable in the case


Controller board front and back



Once the controller board and USB cable were removed the PCB was free to be set up for desoldering.

Desoldering took almost no time at all, or would have had I not been distracted by WCS Europe and didn't have to clean out my soldapullt halfway through. Eventually I desoldered the entire board. The solder was clearly lead free as I had to bring my soldering iron up to around 550 - 650F.

Without the switches the PCB is pretty bare. I find it striking (eh? eh?) that there are no diodes to support key rollover. Is there perhaps something that I still need to learn? Rosewill boasts "anti-ghosting" features which I took to be a marketing euphemism for key rollover.

PCB sans switches



Once all the switches were desoldered the switches and plate lifted easily from the PCB and I set it aside to start popping switches out. I just used a nail file to push the switches out because I had one handy but you could probably use a small flathead screwdriver or even a tweezers to get them out. I ended up with a bucket of switches.

Stabilizers. This keyboard uses an odd mix of Alps and Costar PCB mount stabilizers. I have to fit test the stabilizers off of this board on an old Zenith but it looks like you could harvest these stabilizers to make repairs on old Alps boards.

Alps-y stabilizers and inserts



Costar and Alps stabilizers on the weirdy enter key.


The Enter key uses Alps style stabilizers for horizontal stabilization and costar stabilizers for vertical stabilization. I'm not looking forward to getting it back on. The spacebar also uses costar stabilizers but has mounts on the cap for Alps stabilizers as well.

Overall I'm glad I got this board as a learning tool and to inspect parts for the in progress Tai Hao Alps interest check but I can't say I recommend the board for actual use unless you're really into the layout and want to swap the switches for Matias ones or something.

Bonus Modification: Frankenclone Alps

Clone Alps components
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The underwhelming click of these switches at speed made me think that a stronger spring might improve the switch's tactility and sound so I popped one open and swapped the spring from a Matias tactile (the clicky one) switch and sure enough, the clickiness was markedly improved. I then stuck the clone's spring in the Matias switch just to see what would happen and was surprised to find that the larger click leaf in the Matias switch was unperturbed by the weaker spring and actually felt quite good. Matias switches already feel lighter than complicated while Alps to me and I haven't had the pleasure of trying true blue Alps yet (soon™) but the Matias switch doesn't appear to have been all that affected by the swap.

In order to keep track of these modified switches I swapped the white Matias slider for the teal clone slider and either I put the switch back together slightly wrong or something about the teal slider is less good than the Matias slider because the switch is not as nice as it felt previously. I'll try and reseat the spring and see if it's something I messed up or if there's actually some quality of the sliders that is affecting sound and feel. Material or density perhaps?

Preview of Coming Attractions

Next up: I have four Zenith Data Systems ZKB-2Rs with complicated linear green Alps. One board has been cleaned already and has a few unreliable switches. The other three are still quite dirty but all the switches work somewhat consistently. It'll be my ongoing project to completely tear these boards down and rebuild them. Including retrobrite for the the top cases and doubleshot keycaps and sanding and repainting the rusting steel plates.

[Hak Foo]

Can we see pics of the area around the left side modifiers on the PCB?  I wonder if they drilled anything for a version with a sensibly-sized left-control key.

[False_Dmitry_II]

Those insides look identical to my "XM" alps clones. While they were still on a board, they didn't have that problem of not clicking, or at least not to that degree. They were inconsistent however, when just going across them one at a time, but it wasn't too much to be totally obvious during normal typing. I might notice now because of how incredibly consistent these matias switches are.

The anti-ghosting marketspeak is the same as the ones on gaming rubberdome boards from back in the day. Where they merely attempt to make the matrix more sparse for keys likely to be involved in gaming.

The bigass enter and small backspace doesn't bother me. My original rubberdome had that, and so do at least a few of my mechs, I quickly switch between full ansi and that pretty quickly when rotating between stuff.

[fohat.digs]

The bigass enter and small backspace doesn't bother me.

The opposite is true for me. I have about 4-5 old boards that I love because of the lovely switches (blue Monterey and black Hi-Tek come to mind immediately), and will probably keep, but never actually use because of the small Backspace.

I can live with alternate Enters, but the 1x Backspace is a deal-killer for me.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

This board doesn't have the same "crunch" sensation I felt with quiet Matias switches which went away after a while but it doesn't feel good either.

Yeah that's my big complaint about the quiet switches. Someone else was using my Quiet Pro, but on the odd occasion that I used it, it didn't feel quite as bad as I remember. It will be nice if they do wear smooth with use.

I then stuck the clone's spring in the Matias switch just to see what would happen and was surprised to find that the larger click leaf in the Matias switch was unperturbed by the weaker spring and actually felt quite good. Matias switches already feel lighter than complicated while Alps to me and I haven't had the pleasure of trying true blue Alps yet (soon™) but the Matias switch doesn't appear to have been all that affected by the swap.

That's always been my perception of blue Alps: that the return spring is fairly light (equivalent to 40–50 cN Cherry) and that most of the feel comes from the click leaf.

[skrsh3r]

I actually wanted to try swapping springs from green complicated to matias clicky, but i don't have matias switches on me now, if anyone want's to try that out and report back here i would be grateful  and on the subject that's definitely tai hao board.

[CPTBadAss]

Nice teardown! I agree with Daniel Beardsmore than much of the feeling in Blue Alps is due to the click leaf. But I still love my Blue Alps Kingsaver .

Looking forward to your thoughts on that Zenith. I'm putting some linear green Alps into my Zero!

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I actually wanted to try swapping springs from green complicated to matias clicky, but i don't have matias switches on me now, if anyone want's to try that out and report back here i would be grateful 

It's very hard to judge based on just holding a switch, but I put the spring from my lone green Alps switch into a Matias click switch, and compared that with an unmodified Matias switch, and there was no appreciable difference between the switches. One of them didn't feel quite as smooth, but I don't know which one was which. The force seemed to remain the same, which is interesting, as the springs look quite different:




As I understand it, lower coil density and a greater length both indicate a stronger spring, yet it's not any stronger. What I did notice is that Alps SKBL Grey (simplified grey clicky) is a lot stiffer, while pine SKCM White feels very similar to Matias click. (I don't have a keyboard with Matias click switches though — still waiting for the Quiet Pro ISO for PC to be released.)

[jacobolus]

As I understand it, lower coil density and a greater length both indicate a stronger spring, yet it's not any stronger.

You should also measure the width of the metal wire. It looks to me from the picture like the Matias spring uses thinner wire. Also note that a lot of the resistance in a Matias switch comes from the click leaf; the spring makes less difference, relatively, than in Cherry MX switches.

I agree with you that clicky “pine” white Alps feels very similar (though not quite identical) to a Matias clicky switch. The differences are (1) the Matias switch is a bit crisper than the crispest white Alps I’ve tried (some of this might just be age), and (2) the Matias switch is noticeably wobblier.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

You should also measure the width of the metal wire. It looks to me from the picture like the Matias spring uses thinner wire.

It looks that way, but I can't find an appreciable difference. This is what I got for both springs:



The Alps spring seemed to be closer to 0.2 mm, and the the Matias spring seemed to be closer to 0.19. That difference is outside of the accuracy of my calipers though.

[jacobolus]

The spring constant is proportional to wire diameter to the fourth power, so for example a 5% difference in wire diameter will result in a >20% difference in spring constant.

[skrsh3r]

fairly interesting Daniel, now i wan't try different things even more like using alps slider+alps sping in matias switch with clicky leaf removed and compering them in smoothness with greens