deskthority

Anyone know of "Go-To" boards for harvesting PCB mount Cherry Vintage Black Switches? All of the vintage blacks that I have are plate mount from WYSE boards which won't work for my current project unfortunately. Any tips would be much appreciated!

Also, What's the result of putting a new cherry black switch bottom with a vintage black top and stem? Thinking that might be my other option if nothing pans out if the feel is the same as vintage, but I don't have a newer black switch to test on at the moment.

Tracor Northern keyboards have PCB mount blacks... Not sure if they're vintage.

Some later teletype (text over phone line machines, not sure if that's the term for "newer" old ones) models also have PCB mount blacks.

g80-1800s and g80-3000s always have pcb mount switches, but im not sure those are the kind of boards you want to scrap for switches ) I am not a fan of cherry, so I cant help too much, but alot of older boards came with mx blacks, including alot of POS boards.

For me the most reliable source so far was old terminal boards. Not only G80-2500s, but old wang and dolch terminals. Surprisingly you can even get those boards NIB sometimes!

You desoldered 2500 for switches ?

Yep, couple NIB ones, and few used ones. I use their switches in my ErgoDox and GH60 keyboards, some were used for Falbatech's customer builds that requested NIB or used vintage blacks. I do have cases, PCBs and keycaps (ISO Polish typewriter layout) from those keyboards if you're interested. We're also going to build couple (literally just two) Polish layout (which was always very rare, and now it's pretty much extinct) GH60 keyboards for the Independence Day on November 11th.

The 2500s in questions are beautiful, but unfortunately not covertible so salvaging their parts makes sense. I got two of them too.

They probably could be converted to be used with modern PC somehow but it's wasted effort. It's better to use those super nice switches (and possibly keycaps, which are also awesome mixture of double shots and dye subs) with a modern keyboard that works exactly the way you expect.

In theory they should work with Soarer's converter (since they should be IBM terminal protocol but apparently aren't) but no such luck. You would have to reverse engineer the protocol or replace the controller which is way too much hassle. I agree that it's best to just take the usable parts from them.

I wasn't sure whether the non-doubleshot caps were dyesub or pad-printed. Sadly I don't have my caps with me now to verify. What made you think they were dye sub vs. pad-print, out of interest? I don't remember them at all so can't say for sure.

It's easy to differentiate between dye sublimation and pad printing. Pad printed labels might have a bit of shiny outline around them, when dye sublimated legends are a little bit blurred when you look closely (or with magnifying glass) at them. It's especially easy to tell when the rest of keycaps is super high quality double shots that you can use as a reference.

I know that it's usually easy to tell, but I don't remember the non-doubleshot keycaps being very blurry. The legends were also really bold, which is more like Cherry's high-quality pad-print than their dye-subs. That's why I was unsure. photos-f62/cherry-g80-2500hau-02-in-pol ... it=2500hau
I also seem to remember some of the legends wearing down slightly but I'm probably misremembering as I haven't seen mine in a year or two. It'd be great if they were dyesub though, I'd feel much less bad about using them then!

czarek wrote: […] keycaps, which are also awesome mixture of double shots and dye subs […]

Never seen such a mixture before.
On keyboards whith doubleshots, Cherry used to pad-print and coat (in very high quality) the few caps which were not doubleshot.
This applies to all Cherry keyboards I know and/or own.

Well in that case I must be wrong and those keys are indeed pad printed.

If you are still looking for vintage black Cherry PCB mounted switches, I have 14 boards here. They are all Wyse.