"Vintage" Cherry MX Switches Are A Myth | Change My Mind

[Maledicted]

The title of the thread says it all. I now own 2 Unitek K151-L model keyboards with "vintage" Cherry MX Black switches, neither of which were particularly dirty when I acquired them. I own 4 modern Cherry Mx Blue keyboards, 2 modern Cherry MX Red keyboards, 1 modern Cherry MX Brown keyboard, and 3 modern Cherry MX Black keyboards (soon to be converted to other switches). I believe that literally all of them predate the retooling. As hard as I truly try, the only one that feels any scratchier than the others to me is the Cherry MX Sand/Brown (No offense to those who like MX Brown).

I figured this would be an interesting one to test the waters on. What do you guys think? I mostly use blues and reds on a daily basis, when I must use Cherry switches, and I'm not particularly fond of anything other than clicky switches. Am I just a non-linear heretic?

I have plenty of other ... alternative views to explore on here in the future.

[Remsky]

This thread and title is clickbait, change my mind.

[DALExSNAIL]

This thread and title is clickbait, change my mind.

[zian_]

Browns are good.

[Maledicted]

This thread and title is clickbait, change my mind.

I explained my position with reasons why. Could you possibly do the same? Nobody can change anybody's mind just going off of nejerk statements with no supporting arguments. There's been a lot of talk, all around the internet, for years about the supposed smoothness of vintage Cherry MX Black (in particular) switches. I can't seem to find an actual concrete example of this.

I, personally, can't understand the appeal of browns. They feel particularly gritty to me, and it is difficult to even notice their tactility outside of when they start to feel more scratchy. It seems to me that you're better off with reds, or other tactile alternatives like alps, but I'm no tactile connoisseur either.

[chyros]

It makes sense from a scientific point of view that the tooling wore out over the years and became rough. Therefore I don't think it's a clean break, which makes comparing difficult in some cases, but that said, when I try an old model next to a relatively modern one, I do feel a difference.

Of course, if you want smooth linears, these are still not the ones you need to turn to.

Browns just fail miserably. There is no point to them.

[Remsky]

This thread and title is clickbait, change my mind.

I explained my position with reasons why. Could you possibly do the same? Nobody can change anybody's mind just going off of nejerk statements with no supporting arguments. There's been a lot of talk, all around the internet, for years about the supposed smoothness of vintage Cherry MX Black (in particular) switches. I can't seem to find an actual concrete example of this.

I, personally, can't understand the appeal of browns. They feel particularly gritty to me, and it is difficult to even notice their tactility outside of when they start to feel more scratchy. It seems to me that you're better off with reds, or other tactile alternatives like alps, but I'm no tactile connoisseur either.

Not sure how vintage switches are a myth. If you had an MX switch made in 1988 its not vintage in relation to modern MX 32 years later?

If you are arguing that vintage switches arent always super smooth then I agree. Its batch dependent and the amount the switch was used will affect feel. But from this thread title it makes me believe the former and when I read the OP I started to feel both the former and latter. Just because a vintage switch has the same smoothness as a modern switch doesnt mean it isnt vintage, it doesnt change the age of either switch.

I really don't know what the point of this thread is and honestly the title is still clickbait, nothing will change that.

[Maledicted]

It makes sense from a scientific point of view that the tooling wore out over the years and became rough. Therefore I don't think it's a clean break, which makes comparing difficult in some cases, but that said, when I try an old model next to a relatively modern one, I do feel a difference.

Of course, if you want smooth linears, these are still not the ones you need to turn to.

Browns just fail miserably. There is no point to them.

I do know that the tooling can wear and that that could cause inconsistency in feel, but I have Cherry switches on a given board that may feel scratchy and others may feel relatively smooth, even on very clean boards. Are there specific vintage boards that seem to consistently have smoother switches than others? My Uniteks feel the same as anything else from Cherry.

This thread and title is clickbait, change my mind.

I explained my position with reasons why. Could you possibly do the same? Nobody can change anybody's mind just going off of nejerk statements with no supporting arguments. There's been a lot of talk, all around the internet, for years about the supposed smoothness of vintage Cherry MX Black (in particular) switches. I can't seem to find an actual concrete example of this.

I, personally, can't understand the appeal of browns. They feel particularly gritty to me, and it is difficult to even notice their tactility outside of when they start to feel more scratchy. It seems to me that you're better off with reds, or other tactile alternatives like alps, but I'm no tactile connoisseur either.

Not sure how vintage switches are a myth. If you had an MX switch made in 1988 its not vintage in relation to modern MX 32 years later?

If you are arguing that vintage switches arent always super smooth then I agree. Its batch dependent and the amount the switch was used will affect feel. But from this thread title it makes me believe the former and when I read the OP I started to feel both the former and latter. Just because a vintage switch has the same smoothness as a modern switch doesnt mean it isnt vintage, it doesnt change the age of either switch.

I really don't know what the point of this thread is and honestly the title is still clickbait, nothing will change that.

I suppose that I could have tried to rephrase the title, but that would have been somewhat convoluted. The gist of it is that because I feel that there's literally no discernible difference in feel between "vintage" Cherry MX switches and modern ones, then there's really no reason to single some out as vintage based on a specific point in time where they are supposed to have started to become more scratchy. Those who normally reference "vintage" Cherry MX switches, would not consider switches that are merely 20-25 years old to be "vintage" because the mythos dictates that they're not as smooth as those that are older.

I fail to see how any of this makes it clickbait, especially since I explicitly put the word vintage in quotes to emphasis the very dichotomy that you've described in the first place, but to each their own. I just wanted to start a discussion about "vintage" Cherry Mx, and maybe find a direction in which to move to validate the "vintage" myth. Right now, I'm still not convinced.

[Remsky]

snip

It was shown through material testing that cherry did change the material of their switches sometime in between 1994-95. That is why many people consider this to be the cutoff point for vintage switches (with the exceptions of MX browns since they were designed to be "ergonomic" for kinesis' standards back in the early to mid 90s. Vint browns are usually considered to be 1992-98). Post 94 for mx blacks usually arent great smooth switches which is why vintage switches became so popular for people before cherry redesigned MX again three or so years ago. Of course different batches have different smoothness'. People get this conception that cherry retooled for the first time a few years ago but thats not possible at all. A high quality H13 grade steel could give you half a million mouldings or more depending on the part/plastic and how hot it is being injected into the mold. The maintenance of the mold, etc.

Retooled switch molds seem to have been replaced already at least once. Smoothness has been consistently getting worse for pcb mount retooled mx blacks until around the 1937 date code batch, which has consistently smoother switches comparable to the 1717 batch (I have tried both batches and many in between since I lube switches for a lot of customers). So most likely, the mold reached end of life and they decided to replace it. Consider that many of the boards cherry makes switches for contain 104 keys, so the stem top and bottom housing molds need to be used 104 times per board. With that in mind, 500k mouldings fo a high quality molds life cycle doesnt seem very high, but MX parts are relatively small and assuming cherry maintains its molds well the deterioration rate could be decreased and therefore the lifetime of that mold increased. So if we assume that modern "retooled" switches have had their molds replaced one time, then the lifetime of their "retooled mold" is a couple years give or take. Obviously vintage switch production and modern switch production is probably different. If they made less switches compared to now back in the 80s and 90s, then the mold might last more mouldings, and if they made more, then the mold might last less mouldings etc.

This is no different for vintage switches. Perhaps cherry's maintenance of its molds has improved or changed since decades ago. Its hard to say. Not every vintage switch is made equal. Some are NOS, come from bad batches and feel scratches compared to a modern counterpart. Some could come from a very bad batch but be used so much that it feels as smooth if not smoother than modern mx. Some could just be from a godly batch. Its all luck of the draw, there is no definitive explanation that vintage is better than modern. What we do know is that more use on MX switches means smoother switches over time, and vintage switches fit that bill perfectly (sometimes). But if you were to compare vintage to modern in an apples to apples comparison with the same amount of use, the smoothness would be almost, if not, equal.

[Maledicted]

Fantastic post, Remsky, thank you very much. I had a feeling that much of this is the case. I did forget about the material change though, somehow. This still seems to (mostly) support my very limited experience. I do, generally, believe in the old adage, "They don't make them like they used to." I'm a huge fan of older things for their craftsmanship. However, how much difference can a minimally iterative design have throughout its production life?

It certainly is not inconceivable that wear, tooling changes, nostalgia, and wishful thinking can cause people to give greater emphasis to certain data points over others. It would certainly be interesting to be able to compare as many varying batches of NOS MX switches as possible against each other to put this one to rest one way or another.

I should add that I have also briefly tried an old Cherry MX Black Wyse board that didn't feel significantly better or worse than any of the others either, but I only had moments to play with it at the time.

[flurryvelvet]

Browns are good.

Good in scratching your back.