Enter: The Silver Reed EX43
It felt crisp, tactile, and not at all bad. Once I exploded the thing, accidentally taking out the stem on the "Express" key, I found that the chips inside were all dated from 1983. Well, it wasn't a buckling spring, and the keys were a cross-mount... Had I maybe stumbled on some pre-MX Cherry switches?
As you can see, I wasn't that lucky. The keycaps are thick doubleshots, but are completely incompatible with Cherry switches, due to most of the caps having severely off-center mounts. And, as you can see in the first picture, if you look closely, it's dome and slider.
But a few things make this particularly pleasant to type on. The sliders contain a spring which provides a bit of pre-travel, and additionally, the switches are all mounted in a metal plate, and while it's a bit hard to make out in this picture, the profile seems fun, expecting the board to be mounted at a decent angle.
There was also this strange symbol on the back of the PCB. I still don't know who manufactured the switches, but maybe this will be a clue.
All in all, not a bad board, especially for a dome. I've never tried Topre, or that Packard Bell that Chryrosran likes, or, as far as I know, ANY dome with slider before, so I can't put it on a continuum of those, but compared to all rubber dome keyboards I've tried before, this blows them out of the water. I definitely prefer it to the knockoff white Alps of the Siig Minitouch, and I think I might prefer it to MX Browns, but I haven't typed on those in a while. It'll probably be a long time before I wire this one up, though.
And here's how it sounds: https://youtu.be/1WfO6eNYOKM
Now, as for those previously mentioned keycaps...
After recently picking up a pile of Model Fs and converting them to USB, I've considered my keyboard journey on a temporary hiatus. After all, I had some lovely SKCC Greens with Japanese spherical doubleshots for gaming and any other time I felt like being linear, and a lovely Model F XT for the greatest heights of clicky bliss. So unless I happened upon a beam spring or a Space Cadet, I didn't really have anywhere new to go.
But something bothered me a bit about my Model Fs. I looooove spherical keycaps, having grown up with them on a Commodore 64, and more recently becoming a total snob because of the IBM 6112884 "Pingmaster". And as far as I know, there's no spherical keycaps available for buckling spring boards.
Enter scene left: A corpse.
Why would I brutally tear apart a poor, $8 thrift-store electric typewriter that once, long ago, probably was rather important to someone?
Answer: The keycaps.
Mmm, delicious, delicious sphericals. A few of the keys are a bit odd. The brackets key has a detachable top (the white portion) with a gray engraved legend. And the one key also has a detachable top, but this portion is, sweet tapdancing Christ, doubleshot. Doubleshot detachable legends. Strangely, it's not present on any of the other keys. And the M-R key (known to me as the "Mur" key) is less of a spherical and more of a... horizontal cylindrical.
Now, while the bottom portion of the relegendable keys are single-shots, all the other keys are doubleshots through and through, thick ones, too. This plastic isn't messing around, even if the caps aren't quite as tall as I'd like.
But look at that shine, that curve! That's some wonderful stuff. I wanted to type on these. But how was I going to do that?
Spoilers: A rotary tool, super-glue, and some violence directed at a key stem from my Model M, which resulted in this:
As a test, it totally works. It fits (sort of), it clicks, it operates properly. (Also, look at that THICKNESS!) Admittedly, this is just a test. I've ordered some more black stems from Unicomp, and picked up some epoxy, along with an anti-dust mask (after inhaling far too much plastic) from a local hardware store. The tolerences on this are very tight - There's only a millimeter or two of error in centering the stem that you can deal with before it collides with other keys (as this Mur test key does), and the angle of the key isn't exactly how I want it. Luckily, since these are typewriter keys, they don't really have a profile beyond being spherical, and such should probably work well with the curved backplate of my Model F.
Should.
If I manage to get it all working and put together, I'll post a picture of the finished product.
PS: A bit of a preview of the end goal:
