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geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: N8N on Sat, 13 August 2011, 13:14:49
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Finished up the Filco w/ doubleshots... now I have a quandary.
Before I broke out the soldering iron - my initial plan was to do a Filco with clears and doubleshots to take to work - I figured that I would try one last experiment before diving in. Reason being, I tried browns and didn't like them very much... but ever since getting my shiny new WASD with blues, I've been thinking that perhaps the heavier spring of the clears is not necessary because I find I like the blues quite a bit. (the original, original plan was to mod the WASD to clears and take it to work; I couldn't bring myself to cut it up.)
So once I cleaned up my work space a little bit, I dragged out the G80-8200 (rawko board) that I have with browns, and changed all the keys on my left hand to ergo clears.
dammit, I like them. You wouldn't think that I could tell the difference, but my left hand is definitely bottoming out less than my right, and unless I'm imagining things, the steeper ramps of the tactile bit on the clears makes them feel ever so slightly heavier than the browns, which is nice as well.
I think i'm going to have to change the main part of this whole board to ergos and then do a back to back with real clears to see what's what.
For what it's worth, based on recommendations here to use a Teflon based lube for the sliders, I got some "DuPont Teflon Multi-Use Dry Wax Lubricant" (spray can, does have petroleum carriers if you are worried about same) and just dumped the cleaned clear sliders into a bowl and sprayed the whole things, tossed them, sprayed again, then picked out and laid on a paper towel to dry for a few before swapping them. Seems to work OK, I haven't noticed any keys returning significantly less quickly than the browns.
So I guess the soldering will have to wait for another day, because I'm still undecided on switch choice, although the one thing that I think I am going to do for sure is drop a clear spring in the space bar of the board w/ blues, and if I do ergo clears use a clear spring on that space bar as well, or if I use real clears use a grey stem and spring. The stiffer space bar on the Cherry boards is something I like; I find myself giving the ones on the Filco and WASD a solid "thock" just out of habit.
This whole exercise makes me wonder why Cherry didn't make the brown stems identical to the clears other than color - there must have been a reason, but from my perspective the ergos are what the browns should have been. Then again, I can't understand why clears are so unpopular as well. So there's that.
By the way, has anyone tried lubing the Cherry stabilizers w/ grease as one does with the Costar ones? these rattle a little.
Interestingly, when I removed the clear stems from the board they were in, there was some silicone-looking grease on them which I cleaned off. However, these brown stems appear dry. interesting... (both were Cherry POS boards; the brown board is a G80-8200; the clears donor was a G80-8113.)
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N8N good luck with your mods! I must say it's a bit hard to follow what you're doing, you seem to start a new thread every time you have an update :-) It would be more helpful to have fewer threads, and with descriptive titles. You have started about 40 threads now, almost all of them talking about cherry clears, and the titles don't indicate what they're about, so when someone is browsing "Spy" / "New Posts" / "Today's posts" and sees titles such as "aw damnit" or "last few things" it doesn't help folks that are looking for particular topics of interest. Just a friendly suggestion, your mod progress is very interesting, but hard to follow because each mod/keyboard of yours seems to be scattered in 10 separate threads.
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I apologize if you're actually following my "progress" - truth is, I don't really know what the hell I'm doing half the time which is why I'm here :) I'm just trying stuff to figure out what I like, and it's cool because I love fiddling with mechanical things so this'll keep me out of bars for a while. (the bad news for my liver is, I have a big bottle of bourbon and a fridge full of beer right here, but still.)
I think the doubleshot Filco is the first thing I've posted here that might be a) useful to a reader and b) wasn't subjective opinion and qualified as such :) (and it wasn't an original idea; I thoroughly read the thread in the wiki before diving in. And I still got held up because I forgot about the stabilizers, so even when you think you've planned properly...)
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Your posts are good, I would just concentrate them in fewer threads. I think of GH more like Wikipedia and less like Twitter. Someone will try to benefit from your experience/progress years from now, so having it more concentrated would make it easier :-)
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Glad you like the ergos! Be sure to vote in the cherry clear mods poll!
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I'm holding off until I can spend some quality time with them and decide whether I like them or the regular clears better. Fortunately as of right now I have two identical boards, one with ergos and one with regular clears (which is my daily driver at work for the moment) so that shouldn't be too hard to figure out. I'll just take the ergos to work tomorrow and switch off around lunchtime or so.
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I'm using my Xarmor (which is Ergo clear) right now after, after more than a month spent using my blue Qpad.
Although blues are nice, I was really missing the feedback of the ergo clears (what i wasn't really missing it's that damn \| placed on the wrong place :frusty:)
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By the way, has anyone tried lubing the Cherry stabilizers w/ grease as one does with the Costar ones? these rattle a little.
I have, but just for the enter key. It was not rattling, but it was noticeably stiffer then the unstabilized keys(people do seem to complain about that when it comes to Cherry stabilizers). It does make a difference.
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Well, you know you dislike browns, so you could totally go ahead and desolder all the brown switches from the filco. That would at least let you have less steps to do once you have decided.
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Hah, I've seen people here decide after they do that the browns weren't so bad after all.
Brown are for people not too male to use ergo clears or blues and not to feminine to use reds...:party:
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Hah, I've seen people here decide after they do that the browns weren't so bad after all.
I'm lazy, I just buy another keyboard. I'm even too lazy to sell the ones I don't use.
I'd be willing to take them off your hands. Or pry them from your cold, dead grip.. Whichever. ^_^
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Brown are for people not too male to use ergo clears or blues and not to feminine to use reds...:party:
Clear Filcos aren't that easy to find. Blue Filcos are too clicky for office use, or at home when someone is sleeping. So many people just settle for brown Filcos. Clear Filcos should sell pretty well if they are readily available.
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Clear Filcos aren't that easy to find. Blue Filcos are too clicky for office use, or at home when someone is sleeping. So many people just settle for brown Filcos. Clear Filcos should sell pretty well if they are readily available.
Huh? Are you implying that Clear Filcos exist and are available for puchase if you know where to find them? I have never seen one anywhere.
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If they don't exist, at least one will soon :)
but no, I don't think that any of them ever left the factory w/ clear switches. Which is a shame.
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Marketing people at Filco, listen up! We want Filcos with clear switches. You can create a batch of limited edition to test the water first. I guarantee you the Filco die-hards among us will snap them up in no time. We've collected so many Filcos already, now we want the forbidden fruit for our tactile pleasure.
Who is with me?
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Thanks, Ripster. Do you really work for Filco? If so, the quest for getting the toy in my sig actually has hope. =)
Then again, if you really work for Filco, how come you are stilling living in the land of Ping?
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He doesn't work for Filco. He is a full-time signature editor!
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Ripster is a full-time signature editor? Now you mentioned it, his sig does look rather spiffy!
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Looks like another "masterpiece" in the making.