Congrats!
Those look like SMK switches. Those are pretty nice.
I clean keyboards by taking them apart and washing the plastic parts separately from the electronics.
* Do invest in a keycap puller: wire or H-shaped are the most gentle. Use it to remove all keycaps gently. Be careful with the longer keys that may have stabiliser bars. Put the keycaps in a mesh bag with zipper (lingerie section in clothing store) with some denture cleaning tablets (pharmacy, next to the tooth paste). Zip up, put in a bucket and cover with warm tap-water. Let them fizz for a while and then rinse and dry the whole bag of keycaps.
* Clean the plastic case parts separately with dish soap and sponge. I do it in the shower.
* Use Q-tips, cotton pads, rags with isopropyl-alcohol to clean between key switches and on PCB where necessary.
Great, thanks for the confirmantion and also thanks for your thorough cleaning tips!!
Hi,
the first video is by me.
I noticed these two Vtechs some time ago on ebay and thought I'd tip someone off to get them, but never did. Glad you picked them up.
it's a small world, right?
I was also skeptical how no one else noticed those before, as they seemed to be too good to be true. But apparently, someone (you) did and I was just lucky enough to not have a real competition as you already had one. Thanks for the positive confirmation about them. I really liked your video and how your keyboard sounds and how clean it is, I hope to be able to make my own as clean as yours too.
When I got my Vtech, I took some photos and wrote up some impressions about it: https://imgur.com/a/Ct5v0VT
I have seen that already and again it is also your's!
) I really liked the quality of the pictures, man you must have a really good photography talent. I would easily think that this keyboard would go for 1000s of $, just by how good it looks in those pictures. Amazing work!
One thing that I would like to ask you, because I couldn't find a reliable source, is if all the keycaps are double shot and if their plastic is PBT or ABS? I ask this because I know that the white ones are doubleshot (from the various pictures), but in one of the pictures of the keyboards that I actually ordered (keyboard 2 second picture), the Left Shift key seems to have its lettering faded away at the bottom and that is not a good sign, but maybe it just a photograph artifact. Also what about the plastic case, is it ABS or PBT? Do you know?
In short: I like the board very much. It feels solid enough even if it's no real tank. The switches are really nice if you like clicky switches. They sound more machine-like and not as deep as clicky Alps, but they don't sound bad to me, just different to Alps clicks.
I do like the clicky ones, too much actually. However at work I must use a more silent keyboard and currently I have a CM Storm with Cherry MX Brown switches, which they
suck big time. I just got a Cherry MX Tester with almost all the common switches and guess what: turns out that for me, the worst of them all by far is the Brown. I also think that it doesn't actually have a reason to exist at all, because it feels like a linear (red in particular), but it is
scratchy which makes it awful. And the bottom line is that the MX Red linears feel much better as an alternative. In other words, If I can't have good clicky switches, would rather have the reds which are completely linear but very smooth instead of the browns, which are... just awful. Really, I think that all other MX would be fine for me.
What I
really want to find is a nice tactile one, with sharp and strong bump as the Blue MX but
without the click sound. The MX Clear switch, although very stiff, is more like what I want as a tactile bump, even though it is not as sharp as Blue/Green, it still is much better than the Browns. Anyway I digressed too much, this should be discussed properly in an another topic (which I'll plan to make soon).
Now on topic: I just can't wait to try the VTechs out.
