See, a source told me more recently that Forward did in fact sell the SKBM tooling to Datacomp, and we know that Datacomp are selling Alps clone switches, but Datacomp have utterly refused to talk to me,
I heard from a guy recently who said they offered to send him some samples, and he was asking how I thought Forward SKBM switches compared to Matias clicky switches.
Matias: do you have any comments about the differences between your switches and the Forward/Fuhua switches you were using previously?
Yes, Datacomp did indeed buy Fuhua's old tooling, which was headed for the garbage...
They used that old tooling to create new tooling -- but they didn't have the original drawings. So, it was like making a photocopy of a photocopy of something that has been in your back pocket for the last 20 years -- e.g., sat on, smudged, torn, etc. In other words, not a clean copy of the original.
One manifestation of this is that standard ALPS keycaps apparently don't fit on them properly. Datacomp did the slider tooling wrong, so the stems are the wrong size -- too tight. In fact, the keycap vendor that supplies the keycaps for virtually all the mechanical keyboards made in Taiwan (ALPS and Cherry) actively dissuades his customers from using Datacomp's switches, because they break his keycaps.
The main attraction of Datacomp's switches is that they're cheaper, but I believe that only POS makers are using them -- probably just Datacomp customers. I don't know of any mainstream keyboard that uses them.
BTW, we did not learn any of the above until well after we'd already done our own switches. If we'd known that Datacomp had the old ALPS tooling, we'd almost certainly NOT have done our own. In retrospect, I'm glad we didn't know. It was a lot more work, but we ended up with a much better product. The transparent housing alone has saved us a tonne of grief.
