First: thanks for making this video! It’s great to help people see how easy it is to take apart and put back together their switches, and not be afraid of it, and you’ve done a great job clearly explaining everything you’re doing.
I have a few notes (in the spirit of sharing information; I’m not trying to bash your video, which I think is great):
- Usually a “failing” complicated Alps switch is caused by some problem with either the contact leaf or the little plastic pieces on the switchplate. Often these can be figured out and fixed without needing to replace the switch, but it’s not necessarily trivial.
- I find wire keycap pullers work pretty well for MX switches, but aren’t great for some types of Alps keycaps, which are stuck on very tight. Pulling keycaps off with a pair of butter knives is often quite a bit faster for me.
- This two cocktail sticks + toothpick method seems to be much slower than just using two pointy metal things. Scratching the outside of the switch housing doesn’t really have any particular downside, so I wouldn’t worry about wood vs. metal here. I like using either two small flathead screwdrivers or one screwdriver and one dental pick. It’s possible to pull an Alps switch apart in 1-2 seconds with a bit of practice. A better tool could probably be made out of some material less scratchy than metal but less prone to breaking than a wooden toothpick, but I don’t think scratches are really a problem, so I haven’t bothered trying to figure one out.
- When cleaning the dust/grit out of a switch, the most important part to clean is the top housing (and to some extent the slider). It doesn’t accomplish nearly as much to blow out the bottom switch housing. For very dirty switches, I think the best approach is probably to use an ultrasonic cleaner, though those are expensive and I don’t have one so I haven’t tried it personally. Blasting the top housing with compressed air (e.g. a datavac) gets much of the dirt out, but not all of it; likewise a detergent bath gets some more dirt out, but often not all of it. It might work to swab the inside of the top housing out with a cotton swab (Q-Tip) or something. I still haven’t found a fully satisfactory method for very dirty switches, but I’ve only done a little bit of experimenting, since actually taking apart and cleaning out a full board’s worth of switches is pretty labor-intensive.
- Tweezers are much better tools than fingers or toothpicks for picking up and replacing springs and metal leaves. I also recommend everyone buy a cheap set of dental picks, which are super handy for all kinds of uses.
- The fastest and easiest way I’ve found to reliably put switches back together is to put the slider, spring, and tactile leaf (and switchplate if the switch is fully desoldered) into the top housing of the switch, hold the bottom housing (or whole keyboard) on its end or even slightly upside-down, and carefully guide the top housing/slider/leaf/spring assembly into the bottom housing. Loose switches are somewhat easier to put back together than soldered-in switches, regardless of method.
- Be careful when handling the slider, as it’s easy to abrade off the factory-applied lubricant, and your sweat and hand grease will get on the slider, which might not be great for long-term performance (I dunno, I’m not really an expert here). It’s probably not necessary to wear gloves like Japanese keyboard enthusiasts do, however.
- I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reconditioning worn out click switches by bending the click leaf with a toothpick jammed into the inside angle, though it might work okay with a tactile leaf. Tactile switches wear out by having that angle bend sharper, but with old click switches, the problem is more often that the back side of the leaf has developed a bit of a curve to it. That curve can be undone by very carefully bending the leaf the other way with the fingers, but it’s quite tricky to get a consistent result between switches, and relatively easy to screw the leaf up when bending it. In general, bending the tactile/click leaves is pretty tricky to do consistently. (This may or may not be a problem depending how sensitive you are to differences between switches.) One possible alternative is to swap in tactile/click leaves from Matias switches. They aren’t quite the same shape, but they should usually work okay, and I find them to be very satisfyingly snappy and consistent from switch to switch.
- If trying to bend the contact leaf to change its shape, it might be easier to first remove it from the switchplate, which can be done without desoldering the switch.
- If lubing the slider/housing, the part to lube is the sides of the slider / the inside sides of the top housing, which are the main friction points. Lubing between the slider and contact/tactile leaves might make a slight difference, but not as much. I suspect different lubes will have dramatically different lifetimes. I haven’t really played much with different types though. If you’re going to be spending the serious amount of time it takes to lube all the switches, then the price of the lube is probably rather small in comparison, and you might as well just use one of mkawa’s Krytox mixes.
