deskthority

I ordered 75 relegendable keys from Elipse and while it did take a bit of time (which was absolutely explained on his website), I got them and... actually, I got 76. So thanks for the extra. But I am intrigued by something, which is that they came in a variety of colors. Most of them were the standard grey that you find on mid-late 80s IBM M stems, but a number of them were several other shades. I ended up taking one of my more motley Ms and pulling the original stems off of that, and putting the off color stems in that keyboard, since covered with regular keycaps, you'd never know. It did bug me a bit when it was like that with the clear relegendable covers, but obviously easily solved as I solved it by the kind of person who would buy these keys in the first place.

I'm not really complaining, and certainly the quality of the keys are right up there with what IBM offered, but I am intrigued as to why this is. My first thought was logical: Joe must have found a bunch of old stems somewhere and used them for this product. But I am pretty sure this is not so: these keys have the stem design of Joe's keys, rather than that of any of the 6 IBM Model Ms I own, or the pair of Unicomp New Model Ms. So they were most likely made this way.

The question I really have is simply: why?

My *guess* would be, since the stems are normally a hidden part, the various manufacturers figure it doesn't matter what color they are. If it was me, I'd make runs of stems with the left-over plastic from other jobs, as many leftovers as it takes to fill the molder's hopper.

When selling them, I'd just scoop a bunch out of the bin, count out the required number, and put them in a bag for the customer. I wouldn't worry if they were different colors.

I always enjoyed the variety, and on a couple of boards I coordinated them with the caps above. I have also dyed a number of them, especially to red for positions like Escape and Delete.

The stems for the new relegendables were sourced from Unicomp, which did not separate their stock by color. I did request all one color like the early Model M's but they were already mixed together.

Of course the relegendables are intended to work with the paper templates that will cover all visible sides of each keycap, so the stems would not be visible.

Thanks for that information, Elipse.