[Closed] Unicomp GB of Dooom!

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Muirium
µ

28 Jan 2016, 04:35

Round 2 arrived today, safe and sound! Including all the last minute edits I submitted after the order.
Unicomp Round 2 Overview.jpg
Unicomp Round 2 Overview.jpg (302.26 KiB) Viewed 36877 times
Another round, another multi-page Unicomp invoice.
Unicomp Round 2 Packing List.jpg
Unicomp Round 2 Packing List.jpg (267.27 KiB) Viewed 36877 times
Yes, SSK barrel frames are a thing. And Unicomp just sold us 3 more of them!
SSK Barrel Frames.jpg
SSK Barrel Frames.jpg (203.89 KiB) Viewed 36877 times
They're actually quite flexible. They curve quite easily, as they would need to do when installed inside an SSK.

Also: black keysets.
Black Keysets in Bags.jpg
Black Keysets in Bags.jpg (256.05 KiB) Viewed 36877 times
Notably, you can't order these directly on Unicomp's site. I had to file a ticket. Unicomp does warn that they contain no right Shift key. In fact, all of these sets came with a blank grey 2.75u Shift replacement and a grey ISO Return! Not bad. Intriguingly, they are also *single piece* sets. All the alphas are black inside and out, quite unlike the white, grey and pearl sets we also bought. Fancy that.

But there is something bad about them, more on that next post…

User avatar
Muirium
µ

28 Jan 2016, 04:42

So, those black keysets.

The good news:
  • they are single piece
  • you get a grey Shift and ISO Return key to make up for the missing blacks
  • they do in fact exist!
But it's not all good. I opened them up and was surprised to see shine on these caps.
Black Shine Landscape.jpg
Black Shine Landscape.jpg (180.01 KiB) Viewed 36874 times
That's right. These caps look used. Huh? They're clean and all, but there's shine on all of them, even the alphas.
Black Shine Portrait.jpg
Black Shine Portrait.jpg (172.97 KiB) Viewed 36874 times
We paid $20 a set for these, same price as for the other blank sets. I'm not impressed by the shine at all. But they are pretty neat single piece caps that seem to be of nice quality, besides the wear. Hmm…

I took a look at the other colour sets and those look good and new. It's just these black ones that seem to be worn.

So, what do you guys think? I leave America pretty soon so it's probably too late to complain to Unicomp. I'm peeved they sold us old stuff as new. But at least it's good old stuff, and only applies to these blacks.

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snoopy

28 Jan 2016, 09:30

woohoo!

I think the shine on the blacks is normal. My other set has that also...

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bubblebobbler

28 Jan 2016, 17:10

I am unreasonably excited

(not that my recommendation means anything with like 10 posts, but) I'd recommend Mu highly when it comes to joining GBs, he's been very communicative and gone above and beyond with the minor details, sharing both the good and the bad (none of the bad caused by him, mind you) :)

User avatar
Muirium
µ

28 Jan 2016, 19:10

Thanks. You should probably hold your judgement until you actually get your hands on your stuff. I screwed up royally last time! Plenty of people in this GB ordered all the way back in March 2015 and are still waiting. I left things too late in Round 1, and when UPS screwed up, everything arrived a day late as I was heading for the airport! Round 1 is still here, and now that Round 2 is safely in my hands, it's all coming over in a few weeks as one big bag full of caps!

Anyway, there's been some chatter about the black cap shine situation in Ellipse's thread:
Muirium wrote:
courtesi wrote:
gnarlsagan wrote:
Has anyone asks Unicomp about this, or tried to return the shiny caps?
A while back someone purchased rgb modifiers and there was a difference in color between the left and right hand sides. For example the left shift was lighter/darker in color than the right shift.

Unicomp's response if I remember correctly was that "they fall within spec."

I suspect this will be the same - minimal effort/qc until the owners retire.
That's Unicomp! They make you jump through hoops to order these black sets anyway — they aren't mentioned on the site, you have to know about them already and go file a support ticket — so I expect it's just a pile of old stock from some long forgotten production run they have no plans to repeat again.

I'm not going to bother pestering them, as I'm out of America soon, there's not enough time to ship out hypothetical replacements anyway. And I doubt they exist!
If these are good enough for Snoopy and Madhias, I think that's good enough, full stop! I can just hear Andy already typing about how to "rub off the shine" with a "magic eraser" or some voodoo like that…

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bubblebobbler

17 Feb 2016, 14:57

http://i.imgur.com/WGePtlt.jpg

happy birthday to my keyboard!


any date on when you'll be back over?


I'm not in any rush (and remembering there have been people waiting since march 15, I have no right to be :D), just curious

andrewjoy

17 Feb 2016, 15:40

I wish i had ordered a printed white set now so i could dye them space cadet colours per your idea.

User avatar
Muirium
µ

18 Feb 2016, 03:39

andrewjoy wrote: Dive into it like Scrooge McDuck©
Okay, you asked for it! Here's the Big Bag o Unicomp unleashed:
IMG_7093 2.35.33 am.JPG
IMG_7093 2.35.33 am.JPG (346.3 KiB) Viewed 36612 times
I packed it a bit tighter when it flew over, of course.
IMG_7087 2.35.33 am.JPG
IMG_7087 2.35.33 am.JPG (422.45 KiB) Viewed 36612 times
That's one of those 4 wheeled bags you see everywhere at airports. Packed full of caps! I've a lot of shipping ahead of me…
andrewjoy wrote: I wish i had ordered a printed white set now so i could dye them space cadet colours per your idea.
I wish I'd shared the idea sooner. I got my white set specifically for a dye job, and should have suggested the same to other people. Anyway, there's several in there. You could arrange something with one of the other buyers. Or me if I wind up lazy!

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bubblebobbler

18 Feb 2016, 17:32

pictures are dead

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Muirium
µ

18 Feb 2016, 23:26

Not any more they're not! They were alive for me all along. A complex old issue

Anyway, I'd better get packing these orders.

User avatar
Muirium
µ

25 Feb 2016, 20:09

Picked up a bunch of boxes at IKEA today. Flat packed… interesting squeeze in my assistant's car. That means I can move on to the big and downright huge orders now for all my GBs. Especially the ones including keyboards

User avatar
Muirium
µ

26 Feb 2016, 13:23

Bad news. I just had to emergency evacuate some shelving, whose contents is now covering every available workspace like Vesuvius did Pompeii. I know what I'm going to be doing this weekend. Ungh …

pcaro

03 Mar 2016, 16:31

Items received. Thanks Muirium

User avatar
Muirium
µ

07 Mar 2016, 14:38

Sorry guys. The shipping for these has gone to shit. I'm scarcely at home at the moment. I'll get to you but I can't promise when.

davkol

11 Mar 2016, 19:07

Keycaps arrived yesterday. Thanks a lot!

I actually got three Tux keys and no Esc in one of the Linux kits, but I can live with that.

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bubblebobbler

12 Mar 2016, 19:32

Everything arrived today, thanks!

I don't think I'll ever buy anything from unicomp again though, literally half of what I recieved doesn't even function. Your end of the process went well though :)

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infodroid

12 Mar 2016, 22:50

@bubblebobbler: Is that your Unicomp review published in some other random site?

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bubblebobbler

12 Mar 2016, 23:42

infodroid wrote: @bubblebobbler: Is that your Unicomp review published in some other random site?
yup

I'm not best pleased with what I recieved, and I was already going in with low expectations of unicomp

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infodroid

12 Mar 2016, 23:55

Please don't hold back... Share your experience with DT!

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bubblebobbler

13 Mar 2016, 00:47

copying and pasting it over here, keep in mind some things mentioned will be redundant when moved over here since they'll be making references to this very thread

all pictures from within the thread can be found in this album. They may not make much sense without the context though



This is just a little 'review' of buying from unicomp. I'll mostly be focusing on the negative, because nothing was really positive above what would be expected. I bought from a deskthority groupbuy, and I had no problems with the groupbuy itself, the guy organising it did a great job. My camera is pretty damn bad, and I have to literally take the pictures within a white box to get them to come out viewable.

From the getgo, I couldn't buy an ISO left shift in green or any 1.25/1.5u custom colour keys, and I couldn't order custom keys with non-standard characters printed on them (ie: arrow keys). These weren't offered, so I can't complain about them being missing even if it sucks - but it's part of the experience of ordering something from them, so I'll list it regardless.

I'd ordered through a groupbuy, so I can't fully talk about the packaging conditions of the keys. It seemed fine though - the actual individual items within my order were seperated into baggies and labelled, which is good/fine; the spacebars were wrapped in bubblewrap.


Onto the actual recieved items, here's a list of what I bought, and the condition of the items that I recieved.


The Good: the pearl spacebar has a very nice rough texture, as does the black backspace (somewhat surprisingly, the full sets had some weird wear on them as if they'd been used before...). The Panic key and yellow blanks turned out well (even if I'd bought them due to UC's limited range).

The actual bottom piece of the two-piece caps are either as thick or thicker than the originals (left is the original). They vary in quality, some do not have the rounded corners for example, some are black rather than grey, but overall, it doesn't seem too awful. That being said, I do prefer the original bottoms; I'm unsure if that's because it's what I'm used to, or a structural difference, but I won't hold it against them anyhow.

Onto the bad...

As listed, the spacebar had a broken stabilizer holder.

The green right-shift doesn't come back up when actuated, my assumption is because one of the pegs isn't hollowed out enough. Here's a pic of what I mean. Fixable with some whittling, but not something I'd expect to have to fix. Something similar can be said of the ISO Enter which has a random extra peg as well as lacking a stabilizer. The key has insane wiggle to the point of it only registering being pressed about 30% of the time, so it's completely unusable currently. I'm unsure on what exactly is the cause of that, I'd assume it's the peg as I do not have my stabilizer attached to the board on my original enter key currently.

I'm not super happy with the printing, the keys on the left in this picture are unicomp bought, the ones on the right are from an 1989 M, my camera is awful so it's hard to see what I mean, but the print of the originals are really crisp in comparison. The Left '3' key is one of the things I recieved instead of the custom printed key I asked for. The standard of an old M is pretty high up there, but I'd even go as far to say that this is below an acceptable standard. they dont seem to hide that if you browse their store and look at their printed items though, so I guess I got what I should've expected.



once again, as a disclaimer, none of this bares any relevance to the running of the groupbuy itself; as a late joiner I was very happy with how it went

User avatar
chzel

13 Mar 2016, 01:03

Well, you can't really expect an unstabilized ISO Enter to work properly...Get a stab insert in there and retest...and make sure you use an insert for vertical keys, the hole is offset a bit.

User avatar
bubblebobbler

13 Mar 2016, 01:19

chzel wrote: Well, you can't really expect an unstabilized ISO Enter to work properly...Get a stab insert in there and retest...and make sure you use an insert for vertical keys, the hole is offset a bit.

it is 100% not a stabilizer issue, the wiggle is both horizontal and vertical and much more drastic than anything that would be solved by a stabilizer. Here's a terrible video comparison of the wiggle of both keys when BOTH aren't clipped into the stabilizer thing. It may look like I'm doing more dramatic movements in the second clip, but only because I'm putting both to the possible extent of movement, and the former has much less. I'm not actually putting any force onto the key as much as I'm running my finger over each of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO2fU9V ... e=youtu.be


it's also worth noting that Unicomp's Enter key doesn't even have holes to insert a stabilizer.

User avatar
chzel

13 Mar 2016, 01:34

And I repeat my question. Have you tried it with a stabilizer insert in the top barrel of the Enter?
Like the white one here?
wiki/File:IBM_Model_M_-_stabilisers.jpg
Image

There is no need for a stabilizer wire in this style of keys.

User avatar
bubblebobbler

13 Mar 2016, 01:48

chzel wrote: And I repeat my question. Have you tried it with a stabilizer insert in the top barrel of the Enter?
Like the white one here?
wiki/File:IBM_Model_M_-_stabilisers.jpg
Image

There is no need for a stabilizer wire in this style of keys.


OH, I misunderstood/didn't read properly, I apologise. I have not tried with something like that, but I will asap

User avatar
chzel

13 Mar 2016, 01:54

I'm sure you'll find it way more stable with the insert.
Just make sure you use an insert for vertical keys. Compare the green inserts above with the white (the hole is a bit offset in the white).

hypkx
Chasing the Dream

13 Mar 2016, 12:37

My stuff arrived yesterday, here is a short review:
Like every other order the colour of the underneath 2 piece keycap varies from black to gray to white.
  • 12x Single Unit Key - Buckling Spring - unprinted Color: DB
    really nice colour, sharp blue
  • 12x Single Unit Key - Buckling Spring - unprinted Color: LB
    the same
  • 1x http://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/RGB
    blank rgb set, sharp blue and red, but the green shifts arent that sharp coloured one is light green, the other darker, booth could be better
  • 1x Multi Wide Keys Key Size: ISOE Color: Green Legend: Enter
    to light green, printing is out of alignment, but the printing looks ok in general
  • 1x Single Unit Key - Buckling Spring - unprinted Color: RD
    sadly a muddy red, the red from the rgb kit is better
  • 1x Single Unit Key - Buckling Spring - unprinted Color: OR
    sharp orange
  • 1x http://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/PRGB
    printed rgb set, same as unprinted rgb sets (shifts), printing looks good, one shift printing is higher than the other, but its a ok set
  • 1x http://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/PRK ( Color: RD Characters: Esc)
    a really muddy red, looks awfull but printing is good

    On all keycaps was a little bit shine and some the keycaps like the right shift stick a bit current pressing them.

    In conclusion the keycaps are as imagined and ok. The printing is good except the missing alignment, the red 1u keycaps look muddy (like crap) and if they would have the same red as the ctrl keycaps from the rgb kit they would be perfect.

User avatar
t!ng
Awake Sheep

16 Mar 2016, 19:42

Anybody else waiting with me?

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scottc

16 Mar 2016, 20:44


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t!ng
Awake Sheep

16 Mar 2016, 21:03

Now that's really bad news. Take your time, Mu.

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Spikebolt
√(4) != -2

28 Apr 2016, 15:46

Hey Mu,

I know you're having a really rough time right and I do not mean to rush you or anything! Being with your family is the absolute most important thing in the world right now.

Would it be possible to provide an estimate time for the shipping? Hopefully I don't sound like an heartless bastard, just trying to get a feeling on timings. There's no rush and I really truly understand what you're going through.

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