OK, so I've come into possession of a Deck 82 keyboard and I'm contemplating some future mods for it and have a couple questions regarding Cherry switches.
I'm thinking that at some point I might attempt to desolder and remove all or most of the Cherry black switches and replace them with either Cherry blues or Cherry browns. Based on the wiki article here:
http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Cherry+switches+and+boardsit appears that there are different types of Cherry switches depending on whether they're mounted on a PCB or plate. The Deck 82 switches are PCB mounted so I guess I'll need to replace them with other PCB mounted switches unless the plate mounted switches can be modified and mounted on a PCB.
So, my questions are:
1) Is a PCB mounted version of the Cherry brown switch available? The wiki article only lists digikey numbers for black, blue and white.
2) Can plate mounted Cherry switches be modified to mount on a PCB?
3) Buying 80+ switches from digikey will cost me more than I paid for the keyboard. What's the least expensive common keyboard I can get to harvest either PCB mounted browns (if available) or blues from in order to get started on this?
Thanks.