This was pretty simple to do honestly. I took an AT101 plate, set it over top of the omnikey plate, and marked where I needed to cut. I used a hacksaw blade to make 2 cuts on either side of the area I needed to remove and used a hand file for the rest. I ended up removing too much material but with properly placed holes in the PCB for the pins and a little bit of adhesive (as well as the fact that the top/bottom of the cutout are still tight against the switch) I feel that it is perfectly stable.
Here's the first test fit to see if the holes in the PCB would need correction and they worked out great. There's a small twist to the cap where it's not quite square but that is well within acceptable in my book. If I really wanted something different I would have reproduced the plate and for moving a single switch a quarter unit I didn't feel like it was worth the expense.
So I end up with this nice looking board that I had planned on decking out with something clicky and tactile. You can see in the pictures above what look like dampened creams (or ivories if you prefer) and you would be correct. Those are dampened creams and they are the switches that ended up in the board when all was said and done. This may seem a bit odd as they're not exactly a desirable switch by any means, they certainly aren't bad but not in quite the same league as the ambers I had initially planned to use and they seem like a rather odd choice considering the chassis/caps that are being used.
And that's where we get to switch modding.
Here is a picture of the tactile leaf from a dampened cream. The 2 tabs on each side are responsible for making this tactile instead of clicky. If your tactile alps switches start to click you can carefully bend these tabs outward slightly so that they fit very snugly into the top housing and are less able to move. If you've bent them out far enough they will make the leaf a little too wid eto fin in the housing and you'll have to press on the tabs ever so slightly as you insert the leaf to get them to go into the slot.
This is what the tabs look like when properly bent out. You have to be careful when doing this as too much bending back and fourth will make the tabs break off and they you have a clicky switch. If you're click modding this is exactly what you would do. This mod isn't about click modding though so don't do that if you're following along.
Another thing that this allows for is doubling up of your leaves.
Here's what that looks like inside the switch. I initially tried bending the bottom tab out of the way as well but that just makes the switch harder to close and as I learned through experimenting isn't even necessary. If you're crazy you may be asking yourself if you could do this with more than 2 leaves and yes, yes you can but three leaves is essentially digital so four doesn't add anything but weight really and five leaves don't fit inside the switch without maybe breaking some of the tabs off. Due to the leaves taking up so much space inside the top housing there's basically no room for them to click (I assume a clicky leaf that doesn't have tabs would still be able to click) and so it is pointless to combine a paper mod with a double leaf mod. I tried several combinations of paper modding, putting just grease between the leaf and the housing, butting grease between the leaves as well as the housing, putting paper between the leaves and the housing, and putting paper between the leaves and the housing and none of them are noticeably different in sound or feel to me. Just put the 2 leaves into the switch and call it a day.
This double-leaf mod achieves an absurdly high amount of tactility, but because I'm using dampened creams as my base for the mod and they have relatively light springs compared to other alps tactiles the weight after the bump is actually not that high. This results in a massive and very sharp tactile bump that gives way to a fairly light bottom out. It's actually really interesting to type on such a switch and feels in some ways like the switch is popping like a bubble with every press.
There's really no reason why you couldn't do this with something like salmons, proper creams, or ambers but I wouldn't do that without a spring swap to something a lot lighter than their stock springs as these switches aren't playing around when it comes to weighting, a heavier spring than damp creams would be absurd. I personally like my spacebars to be heavier than the rest of the switches and so I swapped in a salmon spring but it's starting to hurt my thumb as I type this post so I'll probably switch it back if I don't get used to it before too long. The weight added by the tactility is frankly quite a lot so a switch that also has a stiff spring is going to be way too much for basically anyone to actually use without getting RSI pretty quickly. heavier springs (or more leaves would be fine on the escape key or on keys you don't want to press accidentally but for switches where you intend to type on them it would not be ideal.
I chose dampened creams for this project honestly because I had 2 boards worth laying around mostly serving as switch-plate donors and this mod does need a lot of parts so it just worked out. If I hadn't used dampened creams the other option I had would have been salmons and given what I've learned from these I'm glad I went with the switches that I did. I would suggest dampened creams if you were looking to do such a mod yourself or perhaps black alps with some pine housings swapped on.
The tactility is so high on these things that there's no way you won't be bottoming out all the time and the dampening helps soften the landing so to speak. Even though you're bottoming out hard enough that the dampening doesn't really make the switches quiet it does serve to deepen the sound in a way that suits the case and caps of this build very well in my opinion. I really like how unique this feels, it's an amount of tactility that I haven't seen anywhere else and it's really fun to type on. I'll certainly be typing on it for a while until it either makes my RSI worse (which I suspect it will do if I use it for work, I'm hoping casual use will be fine though) or I finish another project and transition to that lol.
The big issue with this mod though (apart from the absolutely silly amount of tactility which isn't for everyone) is the unavoidable and variable clicking. The tactility is very high and is concentrated on one side of the slider and as a result the side of the slider that you press on will alter the sound of the switch. If you press on the same side of the slider as the tactile leaf then it will be relatively quiet as you would expect from dampened creams, but if you press on the opposite side of the slider then the "drag" from the tactile leaves will cock the slider slightly inside the housing. Once the slider clears the tactile leaves it snaps against the other side of the housing and produces a click sound.
Once the caps are on the switch this isn't super loud and sounds more like the clack of a normal undampened switch bottoming out than it does a proper click. If undampened switches were used for s double leaf mod then the effect might not be as noticeable but when using dampened switches it contrasts against the relatively deep and quiet dampened sounds that the switches (especially the stabilized ones) make. It doesn't really bother me personally though. I'd say that if you can handle non-silenced topre (which is dampened by the dome on the down stroke but is plastic on plastic on the up stroke) then this should be just as tolerable.
Anyway here's a sound test: https://v3.fastupload.co/file/13832
I'll get a better recording without commentary up on freesound eventually since fastupload will delete inactive files after a while.
