Sunday morning, during the time I spent upgrading my macbook to os x leopard and putting my new 320Gb drive into it, I was busy seeing whether I could upgrade my Steelkeys 6g to brown stem cherry keys. This experiment "failed" and now i no longer have a caps lock key on my steelkeys.
Okay so these are my findings. Low set keyswitches found in the steelkeys cannot be modified easily due to the way each switch needs some space to release the spring and key stem. And unlike the paper clip method said by people earlier, I have found the best way to release the key switches is by using two precision screwdrivers one to release the latch and the other to keep it from being relatched up since there are two sets of latches.
This method only works on full size cherry switches, whereas steelkeys seem to have full size cherry switch but the switches are burried with in further than my cherry and my compaq keyboards. So I put abit too much power trying to release the upper case of the switch and damaged it beyond repair... not to worry it was only the caps lock key which i will never use in gaming anyway.
Beyond this problem i did manage to get one black stem and its spring. I tested this in my brown stem keyboard (the compaq one), and worked exactly the same. But when using a brown stem and a black spring then you find the keyswitch becomes a bit more rigid, requiring more force and more energy is required to press the switch initally? more similar to a model m i guess but still silent like a brown stem or this is maybe more similar to how old white stem cherrys worked.
black stem with brown spring is slightly different too, there is less energy to push down and keep it down but still feels linear. On another note the springs in brown stem keyboards are noticably shorter than black stems? more activation force?
I have yet to test on my beloved blue stem keyboard and due to not key caps and being at work I am now using my g84-4100 to type to you all to day. I am now thinking what keys would feel like if we put springs from one of those clicky pens into a keyboard. But that issue is for another weekend.
Hope this was informative and now I have a capslockless keyboard in my collection
