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geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: Jixr on Fri, 23 May 2014, 08:49:36
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Hey everyone, I have quite a bit of switches and things laying around, and was thinking for teh lulz of putting 80g (black/green) springs in a brown switch.
What are yall opinions of them?
in regular browns I can barely feel the bump, but thought with heavier springs you may could feel them more?
and whats the nick name for heavy browns?
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I tried 80g Browns in nubbinator's Cherry switch tester (http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=53344.msg1284949#msg1284949). They felt almost exactly like Clears. So I prefer Clears because I don't have to mod anything.
I call them....80g Browns.
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I have clears as well, but I currently have 5 keyboards, and one of them is pretty rough, so I figured I would just use it as a play board and see what I come up with for the thing.
I have greens/blues/clears/browns/reds/blacks, so just figured since its PCB mounted it wouldn't be hard to change out into whatever combo I want.
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Leg lubed Panda clears feel similar to your 80cherry browns, only much less scratchy and sandy. In browns there is a bit more travel before the bump. In clears the bump starts pretty much immediately.
Lubed but not leg lubed Panda clears are significantly more tactile and snappy than 80cherry browns.
I have not tried leg lubing browns but I assume it would make the bump almost dissappear entirely.
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From my own testing I find using stronger springs make the bump feel smaller, whereas softer springs increases the "tactility". With stronger springs, the sideways pressure on the "bump" is proportionally less compared to the downward pressure, at least according to my understanding of what's happening inside the switch. This certainly seems true with Clears, but I have never tried it with Browns.
Please, try them out and let us know. Experiment. Don't just go by "received wisdom", test for yourself to find what you like best.
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yeah, I'll give them a shot eventually, I'm super behind in keyboard modding.
I need to paint a few cases, paint a poker plate, sleeve some cables and a few other things on my list of things to do.
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Please, try them out and let us know. Experiment. Don't just go by "received wisdom", test for yourself to find what you like best.
Yup, totally agree with this. It's definitely worth checking out yourself.
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From my own testing I find using stronger springs make the bump feel smaller, whereas softer springs increases the "tactility". With stronger springs, the sideways pressure on the "bump" is proportionally less compared to the downward pressure, at least according to my understanding of what's happening inside the switch. This certainly seems true with Clears, but I have never tried it with Browns.
Please, try them out and let us know. Experiment. Don't just go by "received wisdom", test for yourself to find what you like best.
Actually, when I switched to thick pbt caps, Panda Clears had the most snap on the upstroke. Compared them to stock clears, 62g clears, 62g leg lubed clears, and 45 cherry clears.
The 62 leg-not-lubed came in second and with thick vortex pbt made me wish I didn't leg lube the ones in my watermelon board.
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and as keycaps go I have everything from the stock caps to thick dub shot PBT caps, so I can play around, but generally the thicker the better for me.
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If you put heavier springs in an MX brown switch, any bump becomes quite hard to notice. If your goal is something more tactile than an MX brown switch, I’d recommend trying MX clear switches, and if those still don’t feel like you want, just picking up some completely different kind of switch.
Cherry MX are all basically linear switches, with some slight variations based on scratchy plastic-on-plastic friction. SMK “monterey”, Alps (or Matias), IBM Model M/F, Hi-Tek “space invader”, etc. switches are much more substantially tactile than MX switches.
[If you’re stuck needing an reuse an MX-compatible plate and keycaps, you might try to find SMK switches with an MX keycap mount. These should clip into any plate designed for MX switches, and with any MX-compatible keycaps, but have a different pin layout, and so need either a custom PCB or direct wiring. But I think they feel nicer than any MX switches. Then again, maybe you aren’t a fan of the loud clickiness. http://deskthority.net/wiki/SMK_Cherry_MX_mount]
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Tactoblack sucks.