Preh Commander AK PC-1

User avatar
TNT

15 Oct 2021, 14:54

Recently got this board off good ol' Kleinanzeigen because it looked kinda interesting to me.

As some people expected, it's a dome with slider (thank god it's not F&F :D ). I never had one of those type of boards, but this one feels great, I'm kinda surprised. Sharp, tactile bump and very snappy. Light keyfeel (spacebar is maybe even a little too light, if you ask me). You don't have to fully bottom out to register a keypress. It's not scratchy or bindy, like not at all, which is also kinda surprising considering the age and condition of the board.

It runs on some kind of XT-protocol and works via Hasu's XT-converter (God bless this man). Keycaps are thin PBT with a grey print and a black front-print on a few of them. Cross mount and MX compatible. One single, lonely locklight on the Capslock key. They did it the lazy way and stabilized only the spacebar and went with stepped keys on the rest. I don't mind it, since I've always liked the looks of stepped keys, but I'll never get used to that Enter key :lol:

Build quality in general is giving me mixed feelings. You could say it's built different :duck:.
On the one hand there's a good amount of metal in the board. It seems though that all that metal used for the chassis and so on is aluminium which makes it feel kinda light and cheap. It has an Aluminium back panel with some sort of enamel coating, plastic top housing and another aluminium sheet on which the membrane assembly is glued on. The glue/foam is peeling off or even disintegrating on some spots but it seems this doesn't affect the performance of the board, yet. This plate is bolted together from two smaller sheets, but only on the top, leaving room for flexing/bending at the bottom part. The slider assemblies are fixed to the plate with plastic rivets, but fortunately nothing has come loose yet.

The spacebar seems to like to get stuck which could be because of the age and the grime, so let's see whether I can fix that or not.
I'm in the process of cleaning it right now, will add more pictures later.

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Thanks for reading and have a good day y'all 8-)
Last edited by TNT on 15 Oct 2021, 16:47, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Palatino

15 Oct 2021, 15:18

Thank you for the update - lots to like here, especially the name: Commander! I like the presence of function keys to the left and above. The snappy dome-with-slider, Cherry mount and grey lettering together remind me of Maxiswitch keyboards, though I don’t know if there’s any connection - MS domes are usually on the stiffer side. Good luck with the cleaning: there’s nothing worse than a sticky spacebar!

User avatar
TNT

16 Oct 2021, 15:50

Here are some pictures after the cleanup. Typing this on the board rn. Added two springs to the spacebar as a temporary fix. The silicon dome on that one seems to be in bad shape and doesn't provide enough return force. Doesn't feel very nice, I will have to tweak that later.

I'm really starting to appreciate the keycaps, the print is quite gorgeous :)
Secondary prints were damaged more or less while sitting in the ultrasonic. Not too much of a loss, they look(ed) very cheap imo.

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