Fixed! It was not the switch at all. What happened was a plastic retaining clip for the backspace had come off. There’s one to the left and one to the right of the key.
The hardest part was getting the retaining clip back in the little plastic tabs. The first went in no problem, the second probably took five minutes. I got out the silicon lubricant and everything and thought I must be doing something wrong.
The clip is similar to the one on this video. I always hated taking apart spacebars and all the long keys.
I don’t know how comfortable those keys will be for fast typing. There is a circular ridge that protrudes out on each key and that doesn’t look at all comfortable. Aesthetically though, it’s beautiful.
I did too, and sucked up enough white out fumes to probably kill some brain cells, until we got ourselves a white ribbon or whatever that thing was that you put down in front of the paper to take away the ink.
I still fill old. My young nephews, they’re not even going to know what tube TVs are either.
Wikipedia says correction fluid or white-out. All I know is I was about ten or maybe 12 when we moved to printing from a computer. Before though it was liquidy white stuff with a brush, rolly ribbon things that often broke off or that extra ribbon you kind of held in place to type over it.
Before our family became proud owners of an IBM Selectric, we had some kind of old manual lever-based (non-electric) thing. While it was kind of a pain to set your tabs on it, I used to kind of study how the thing was put together when I was a kid, and even then, it seemed to me like some kind of mechanical marvel.
Then we got a Selectric, and trying to figure out how that ball thing worked on a mechanical level just blew my mind!
I’ve had a CM Quickfire for a couple of years. It’s a solid, dependable mechanical keyboard, but the only negative is that the LED backlighting only works on selected “gamer profile” keys like WASD and the surrounding letters, and the first half of the number row. I finally decided it’s time for an upgrade. Well, just like the flashlight thread, I’m blown away by the difference a couple of years can have on prices.
Heavy-hitters like Cherry and Das are still expensive, but there are a ton of boutique builders now using cheaper knock-off switches that have really lowered the floor on pricing. It’s kind of crazy how low the prices are now. There are sub-$100 keyboards offering features that used to be the exclusive territory of units that were twice (or more) as expensive.
I wonder about the overall build quality of those cheaper mechanical keyboards. One thing I like about the Logitech G710+ is that it’s a solid, heavy keyboard. It’s not flimsy and doesn’t sound or feel “cheap” to me. (I still hate the G keys though.)
I had my reservations, but the ones I’ve seen have been pretty darned good.
I grabbed this one, for a cheapo test, and I’m really surprised at how solid it is. $40! Crazy. It kind of puts my Quickfire to shame for the amount of money I paid for it.
