If you don't mind losing the spring completely, I pried out the leaf spring and then used small needle nosed pliers to pick and yank out the coiled spring. (Watch out for the spring flying out though.) The coiled spring will be destroyed, but seemed faster - I think I finished all the switches in a few hours.
Yeah, I didn't want to do an irreversible mod. I know this will probably sound crazy, but the board had some charm with the springs in it - fast actuation and heavy damping of the stroke actually forced me to adapt the writing style, and I liked where this was heading though it felt terrible.
So I first torn out the numpad, and that took me around an hour of figuring out how to make that, finding the tools, etc.
Then after a break went for the arrows, pgup/pgdn cluster and above, took me around 20 minutes, and then went for all the letter rows and did them all under an hour! It went really smooth:
- took off the keycaps
- pushed all the pins out with a mechanical pencil from the back of the plate
- pushed the plastic locks with a finger one row at a time, so the plastic actuators popped up a little
- pulled each of them out, removed the spring, put it back in (really fast, under 20s per switch!)
- put them back in
- once row completed, press the pins back in.
I left numbers, function keys and enter untouched for now, to see what happens.
The only issue I have with this board now is the uneven actuation force of the switches. I did some mockup weighting of switches to increase their inertia, but it was kinda meh.
I always liked extremely short travel keyboards, had UltraX for desktop and used an older Thinkpad. Main reason I shyed away from mechanical switches was the travel.
This here is short, awesome, very hard to bottom-out with my typing style, and makes the UltraX feel like typing on a bathroom floor!
Totally love it.
The switches do become really light though, I kept accidentally actuating them while resting my fingers on them...
Agreed, feels like one of those 6000dpi mice on max sensitivity, but on a keyboard!
Lots of accidental keypresses, it's totally unforgiving
I didn't see it bounce yet though, and I know some people reported that as an issue.
