Filco 87 Cherry Switch Tester

[BossBorot]

When I bought my first cherry keyboard I bought it without ever having tested a cherry switch before. Like many here after deciding which keyboard to buy after a short period of time I wanted to try them all. However doing this is quite difficult without buying a lot of keyboards.

There are a few great community provided opportunities on geekhack and deskthority to test out cherry keys however none of them provide all of the modified switches. Additionally a modded keyboard can give you a much better feel for each of the keys and how they would perform on a keyboard.

I had enough stems and springs left over from when I was modding my main keyboard to try each switch without buying a new keyboard to put together a tester keyboard with multiple keys of each modded switch combo and regions of 8+ keys for each of the five stock keys as well as ergo clears.

Below is the layout that I decided to build after bouncing ideas off a few members here who have built testers in the past.



I wanted black and red on either side of each other so that whoever is using the tester can more easily compare them by typing with one hand on each side of the keyboard at an even height. The same thought went into the placement of the blues and browns. I put clears and ergo clears in the center as they tend to not be as popular as the other four keys that got keys closer to the standard hand positioning when typing. I decided to put ergo clears at the same height as blues and browns as most people that like ergos tend to like lighter springs with a tactile bump which would mean their most direct competition would be brown and blue.

The bottom row will likely be switched if I can get my hands on rarer switches as will the esc key which I want to be a green to test against the spring modded blues.

I also only have black stems and not red currently so I had to make ghetto reds. I have an order placed in the phantom group buy but I have no idea when I will get my hands on red stems. When or if I get them in addition to putting true reds in the linear with clear spring region would have one row of black with clear springs and one row of red with clear springs.

[hashbaz]

Nice!  Best of luck with this project.

[Talfrey]

Looks phenomenal! And a great service to the community! Bravo!

[mazessj]

Aren't Red sterms and Black stems identical (as they're both linear) and aren't Black springs and Clear springs basically the same? That would make some of your current and proposed combinations redundant.

I like the idea of putting in alternative switches, though, such as Green.

[BossBorot]

red and black stems are identical however some users on deskthority state that there is a difference between ghetto red and red. I personally believe that ghetto red = red but I would like to put red stems in if possible especially in the red section at least to avoid confusion.

Black and clear springs are not the same but they do have the same force at the middle point of a keypress. Clear springs have a sharper force graph so they are lighter for the first half of a key press and heavier in the latter half of a key press vs black springs.