Solidtek ASK-6600 woes

[Askal]

Hey folks,

I'm here after googling about this problem and finding a 2013 thread I figured I shouldn't necro. To the point, I've got the keyboard in the title and I love it. Besides, I got it before the mechanical keyboard hypetrain hit the mainstream hard and it was still cheap. And now I'm really on a shoestring budget so I can't just up and replace it. I got three little problems, the latter two becoming pretty big problems in FPS games. *coughfalloutfourcough*

• My 7 key doesn't give feedback, which I can live with but would rather not.
• My S keycap is busted though it nestles between the surrounding keys enough for use... Mostly.
• My Tab keyswitch has a wall busted where it holds the keycap and without the benefit of surrounding keys like above, is a real pain.

I'll do a patch job and replace my problem keys with less used ones if needed... but figured I would check first if anyone here had spares they were willing to help me with.

Thanks for looking!

[Morning Song]

It might not be 100% identical, but IIRC that board uses Fuhua ALPS clones--of which Matias' Click switches are almost the same thing. I haven't actually done it myself, but it should be possible to buy a couple Matias switches and swap parts as needed.  (ALPS-compatible switches are almost always possible to open up without any desoldering. You just need a flathead screwdriver and preferrably a set of twizzers to open them.

[Askal]

Hey, thanks for the tip! I'll look into that.

[drewba]

A retailer in Texas cleared a ton of 6600s out for ~$10 shipped (CONUS) around a year ago. I bet a lot of them are collecting dust,  you might want to start a topic in the Classifieds section once you have enough posts.

[jdcarpe]

Yes, I bought four of those keyboards, and the QC on them is not the greatest. You should be able to desolder those few switches and replace them, as Morning Song suggested. They are indeed Alps clone switches.

[Askal]

Thanks for the replies, folks. I did do some soldering and rearranging but the build quality was bad. Like unbelievably bad. I pulled off all the caps since I figured I should give it a clean while I was at it. I did as gently as I could with a keypuller, wiggling and coaxing, but it would pull off the entire keyswitch at times anyway except for the copper(?) contact that are the solder points. Even with the ones that didn't do that, little bits of rubber and plastic were shedding like my cats' fur. Note that this is a keyboard I've used for a few years and once spilled water on (did immediately dry off as much as possible) but this is something else. This is actually the second time I had to fix it. Once before, it would register as the 7 number row key as always pressed even when not pressed at all. Now it's doing the same thing to ctrl so I've given up since anything I try won't work this time and I really need to be able to switch crouching/standing on demand.

I am still favourable to ALPS/clones and interested in MX Blues (I'm such a sucker for the click) but I definitely won't be looking for them in this particular model. Since I did find a previous thread on this model through Google, I'm posting this as a warning in case anyone interested in it looks it up and finds this thread.