On today's trip to the local thrift store, I picked up two electric typewriters - one for the keycaps (which we'll get to later), and one because the keys just plain felt weird beneath my fingers, and I wanted to take it apart and see what the hell was up with this thing.
Enter: The Silver Reed EX43
[img]http://i.imgur.com/ghpwreG.jpg">>
![](http://i.imgur.com/acNoksf.jpg[/img<br />It felt crisp, tactile, and not at all bad. Once I exploded the thing, accidentally taking out the stem on the "Express" key, I found that the chips inside were all dated from 1983. Well, it wasn't a buckling spring, and the keys were a cross-mount... Had I maybe stumbled on some pre-MX Cherry switches?<br />[img]http://i.imgur.com/ghpwreG.jpg)
As you can see, I wasn't that lucky. The keycaps are thick doubleshots, but are completely incompatible with Cherry switches, due to most of the caps having severely off-center mounts. And, as you can see in the first picture, if you look closely, it's dome and slider.
But a few things make this particularly pleasant to type on. The sliders contain a spring which provides a bit of pre-travel, and additionally, the switches are all mounted in a metal plate, and while it's a bit hard to make out in this picture, the profile seems fun, expecting the board to be mounted at a decent angle.
There was also this strange symbol on the back of the PCB. I still don't know who manufactured the switches, but maybe this will be a clue.
All in all, not a bad board, especially for a dome. I've never tried Topre, or that Packard Bell that Chryrosran likes, or, as far as I know, ANY dome with slider before, so I can't put it on a continuum of those, but compared to all rubber dome keyboards I've tried before, this blows them out of the water. I definitely prefer it to the knockoff white Alps of the Siig Minitouch, and I think I might prefer it to MX Browns, but I haven't typed on those in a while. It'll probably be a long time before I wire this one up, though.
And here's how it sounds:
