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.)
