I have a Ducky keyboard with plate-mounted Cherry Browns that take 55 grams of force to depress. Being plate-mounted I could not get to the springs to replace them with lighter-weight springs, so I decided to try something original. Each keycap has 0.8 cm^3 of space to fill... so what is heavy that I could fill them with?
Lead is malleable and cheap, and weighs a good 11.35 g/cc. That would net me about 9 grams, bringing the Browns down to 46 grams of force to depress. However, the university machine shop has a specific prohibition forbidding work with lead. Gold is permitted in the machine shop, and weighs 19.32 g/cc. That works out to 15 grams in the keycap, and a 40 gram Cherry Brown! But at over $50 USD per gram I would be unable to afford even a single keycap! That brings us to an interesting situation. There is no university prohibition on working with Depleted Uranium, and in fact it was not very hard to to find some DU "spare parts" from broken tank armour. At 18.95 g/cc it is almost the same density as gold!
I've got the ASDFGHJKL;' keys already done, and typing on them is very interesting. I can Rip-o-Meter them with eight nickels, so I have achieved 40 grams each! But the typing experience is completely different. Instead of pressing down 2 mm to achieve activation, one can "push" the keycap down a bit, and inertia carries it the rest of the way. Combined with the
leather keycaps the fingers really feel like they are floating. Apparently the rebound back up takes some time as double keypresses sometimes register only a single press. I'll see how long I can live with that, or if I get used to it.
