Ha, yea, I banished the stupid ThinkGeek trinket to the closet.
Yea, I kind of wish I'd gotten to assemble the whole thing myself. Starting with 400 naked parts and the expectation of a leisurely weekends work would have been more enjoyable. Whoever built it made a small mistake during assembly. There was no way to make a layout work with the keycaps I had, so I had to swap the two left barrel assemblies: (before picture)TNT wrote: 06 Apr 2022, 14:01 Sounds exhausting. Great to hear it's working now! What went wrong with the two springs on the return key tho?
Yea, having one other keyboard build under my belt was pretty crucial. A similar fear put me off buying a vintage model. I can figure out how to fix things when everything is new, but well worn parts add an additional layer of difficulty. The manual for the new Model F makes clear that each spring has to sit in one orientation with the end of the spring's coil at the 12 o'clock position. That probably doesn't matter until the spring has been buckled in one direction for a few years, but getting that orientation right on a used spring would add another layer of difficulty to correctly compressing springs to sort out stuck, pinging or laggy keys.Palatino wrote: 06 Apr 2022, 15:28 It's tales like this that put me off ordering one of these directly. I know I'd be awful at fixing any issues, of which there seems to be quite a variety. Mind you, if anyone is already bored of theirs (!) or in need of the cash, I'd be interested in buying a ready-to-use one with all the bumps ironed out already...
I kept thinking about how old world this keyboard is while I built it. It's like an old car with points and a carburetor. Fixing it isn't an exact science. I imagine it was like this when they were new, each board just spent a good chunk of time in QC before getting boxed. I'm a newcomer, though, maybe I'm totally off.Muirium wrote: 06 Apr 2022, 15:37 Quality Assurance: one of the Achilles heels of small batch productions like this. Understandable but annoying.
Mind, I don't own a Model F that I haven't been inside to move things around, but that's the vintage experience, too! Wasn't when they were new, though.
Very cool! Your experience sounds like cracking open a sarcophagus.Muirium wrote: 06 Apr 2022, 16:40 You're not wrong. They had a few minutes of QC each, as I recall from some IBM promotional video of the process in Greenock; shared here many years back so I can't remember where to look. This was done by well trained humans who gave every keyboard (and everything else they made) a specifically crafted sequence of tests before initialling the sticker and sending it on. It's a very, very hands on kind of industrial process!
As for diddling around inside the oldies, here's my first time inside one back in 2015:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9791
I don't recall being so fussy about spring rotational symmetry, though! But yes, there's a lot of shuffling and shoogling these beasts.
I mean, as Muirium pointed out, this is guy is running a group buy, not a company. I'm grateful for his efforts jumping through so many hoops to get these things remade. While I waited 11 months for my F77 to arrive, I certainly wondered how someone could maintain their sanity building thousands of keyboards by hand. That's the challenge. To your point, though, two of the four screws that hold my case together had partially stripped heads. That's a very novice mistake to make on something you've done a thousand times. Maybe he's getting help.Jacobalbertus1 wrote: 06 Apr 2022, 17:09 this just shows that ellipse is lieing about his QC standards what he says makes shipping take forever as this would just not pass QC
