deskthority

I have been working on a board with a Hi-Tek grid. Some of the key caps are replacement blanks. The color and profile is all wrong, but that's not the main thing about them.
Even though they are blank, they are double-shot, suggesting that they usually had legends. And they are cross-mount. In order to accomplish this, there are plastic adapters, one end of which fits into the slider and the other end of which holds the cap.

The cross is close to symmetrical and about 4.8mm across (so bigger than Cherry, smaller than Datanetics).

Is anyone familiar with these? What business situation caused there to be demand for them?

So they used adaptors to mount cross mount caps on HiTek/Stackpole 'box' mount switches? How much taller are they than regular box mount caps?

This is really unusual, my guess is the keyboards were serviced by the terminal / system maker and they ordered replacement parts from another company.

All in all that's very unusual. I have a keyboard assembly from a Ti99 I bought ages ago I'm probably going to steal some sliders out of (to replace all the broken stems in my Geac board), so if you want a set of black Ti99 caps (not sure if Hitek or Stackpole) let me know (weird black blanks are probably cooler though)

These sort of adapters appear to be common for the spacebars of hi-tek boards.