deskthority

I want to know if anyone else owns White Alps switches that have dry lubricant on the sliders. I like to call these early White Alps (original name, I know), but they share the dry-lubricant from Blue Alps, as well as the gold-tone springs. But the switchplates are short.



Has this ever been documented before? If not, I'm willing to provide more information about these switches, what keyboard they came from, etc.

Check my NeXT Non-ADB keyboard thread. There is lubed white Alps pics there with internals shown. Does this match up with yours?

snuci wrote: Check my NeXT Non-ADB keyboard thread. There is lubed white Alps pics there with internals shown. Does this match up with yours?

Not exact. My White Alps are clicky but yours look tactile. And mine have the short switchplate. Not sure if the springs are similar. But other than that, the sliders look very similar. Do you know what the manufacturing date for the board is? I got these switches from a board manufactured in 1990.

keycap wrote: Not exact. My White Alps are clicky but yours look tactile. And mine have the short switchplate. Not sure if the springs are similar. But other than that, the sliders look very similar. Do you know what the manufacturing date for the board is? I got these switches from a board manufactured in 1990.

The keyboard controller if from the 50th week of 1988. Take pics anyway and please post them. It never hurts.

Yeah, that's been spotted before. I've even seen what appears to be dry lube on bamboo blacks!

I have a Monterey K104 from 1989 that has dry lubricant on the sliders that looks very much like that as on my NTC KB-6151 with Alps SKCM Blue. While the dry lube visible the easier way for me to determine is the keyfeel, the very clean white Alps in that Monterey K104 are very smooth for white Alps compared to my Focus FK-2002 with blue Alps that is very clean also.

This to me confirms once again that the slider color plays much less of a role with Alps SKCM since Alps Electric had a production change in the SKCM series in 1988 from blue to white but they still used the same or a very similair production setup for the white SKCM in 1988 and for a (unknown) period of time after that until they eventually moved to simplified Alps.

Is anyone any closer to finding a good dry lube product on sale today?

snuci wrote: Check my NeXT Non-ADB keyboard thread. There is lubed white Alps pics there with internals shown. Does this match up with yours?

Those are not “white” Alps, they’re more like a cream color, though not as saturated as the later damped switches. The cream/ivory switches on NeXT keyboards predate white (or black) Alps, and were concurrent with blue/amber/orange/green/etc. Alps switches, with tall switchplates.