Went over my royal hako board with the cap method, for some reason it was a lot harder than my previous two, I could see the little bits of horizontal stem being shaved off.
Kept reapplying the cap horizontally on each stem, testing vertically, reapplying, testing again, etc until the cap would fall off effortlessly to gravity or catapulting off from the hako clear springs.
Putting caps back on, I went to check them once again, one at a time with a bright light as I did so. Now that I knew what to look for after seeing my cracked novelty, I found that
Every. Single. Cap. was cracked or had stressmarks. Fug.
Since the switches were freshly "shaved" I took accents off and tried a monotone look using caps I
had never used before.Checking them NOT MORE THAN THIRTY SECONDS LATER, I can see
the beginnings of stress points. And these are switches I had reworked until they were "loose" with the stainless steel RAMA cap.
So in short
DON'T PUT CAPS ON ANY BOX STEMS!. I can't trust this shaving method will make them "safe" any longer. Maybe I did it wrong, maybe the filing method will work better but at this point I'm just going to desolder everything.
I really liked this quirky layout too.
Maybe I'll try building this with different switches but oh yeah, my caps are all cracked!