Been meaning to register to post in the other thread (Alps Lubricant Found) but it does seem like this did need its own topic.
I thought I'd chime in as I'm a long-term suffer of medium to good-ish quality Alps, knowing they're my favourite kind of switch but not being able to fully unlock the true goodness (and not having the patience or money to seek out some proper NOS or better condition ones). I've gained a huge amount of invaluable information from this forum and wiki in terms of sourcing and maintaining Alps switches, so am very grateful for that!
Well, I can say I've tried the waxboiling method on some Orange, Salmon and Pine White Alps and it's been a real success in all cases.
I would add the caveat that this is in comparison to my previous method of cleaning with alcohol swabs and lubricating with PTFE spray (and, for one board, with Krytox 3203, which I've gathered isn't a good idea long-term due to attracting dirt, but I did it as an experiment and it did work well). I know this makes it a bit less scientific as I haven't had tried a set of boiled-only switches. But I was pretty thorough in my cleaning before.
My experience before with that was that the alcohol swab cleaning made some of the switches feel okay, but it certainly didn't improve my bad Oranges much, which I felt were probably 6/10, that much. PTFE spray didn't make that much of a noticeable difference.
I've used the method on two sets of Oranges, a set of Salmons and a set of Pine Whites now. My hand-wired M0116 with Oranges is now back where it should be as my main daily driver and it's a dream - can report smoothness very much maintained after over a month of very solid use for work and gaming. That board was the one with my better quality Oranges which I'd previously lubed with Krytox 3203, so it was pretty smooth already, but there was just a niggling inconsistency that used to always make me get tired of using it after a while - that's completely gone now.
My other Salmon and Orange boards were also improved a lot in terms of consistency and removing binding. The Salmons were in the least good condition originally of all of them (maybe 5/10), and while they're not perfect still in terms of smoothness, they still feel great to me and very consistent. I've just made a new custom build with them and it's a candidate for a new daily driver in fact. The Pine Whites I haven't tested loads as they're just being used on the non-alpha keys on one of my boards, but they feel very good.
Some observations from the overall process:
- The wax deposits do tend to look uneven between switches to the eye, but this doesn't translate to keyfeel inconsistency.
- When I used a bit too much wax, I found it necessary to scrape out the gunked up bits from the crevices of the slider rails with a cocktail stick. This especially made a difference on the least good condition switches I have, the set of Salmons.
- I also waxed the top housings on those not-so-good Salmons. It made maybe a slight bit of difference but not much on the first attempt. But I then scraped the excess from the crevices with a cocktail stick along with the sliders and that improved things a lot.
- On each try, the keyfeel was pretty bad at first after re-assembling the switches. They just took a bit of key mashing to break them in and start feeling smoother.
- Bamboo top housings definitely warp badly when boiled - I accidentally left a single White Dampened switch in with a batch. The slider was fine, though I'd already taken off the rubber dampers so not sure if they would have melted.
- I didn't experience any of the trouble with springs not fitting that others have reported.
For reference I followed the process from Kuritakey's
video and
written guide, with the additional steps of scraping the tactile leaf sides with a guitar pick and scraping the slider rail crevices with a cocktail stick as mentioned above. I did about 60 switches a time in one big mug, using maybe a heaped teaspoon worth of tealight wax shavings, though that was probably too much, hence the gunk.