Silence – the devil on angel wings

When people are looking for a silent keyboard they are usually looking for silent switches. And this is the wrong approach because silent switches can cost in excess of 1$ each.  Yes, there are Cherry MX silent switches but these can be quite rare and frankly horribly scratchy (there is a degree of scratchiness that heroes can tolerate however I am not amidst them). When we multiply by the number of keys desired people quickly back off and realise that this is harder than it looks as that would be the price for the switches alone. And a single flower does not make it spring and all the switches maketh not a keyboard.

The initial question regarding what keyboard is in the person’s current use makes more sense that it may seem at a first glance. This is because most of the unpleasant sounds a keyboard makes are not related to the switches used but to the stabilisers. And if their answer is something similar to “yep, was ok when I bought it” then we found a way to help them. So I explain that when the ashtray in your car fills up you do not change the car, you just empty the ashtray. And the ashtray to the car is what stabilizers are to keyboards.

Stabilisers are, as we now know, metallic wires (usually steel) with or without plastic components used to stabilize keycaps longer than or equal to Backspace. These make contact with plastic and this yields an upleasant sound, a sound that is eliminated by a lubricant. This lubricant is present on all stabilisers of all keyboards that leave the factory (or the box) but in time it tends to migrate to areas where it doesn’t fulfil its main function.

What we need is a tube of dielectric grease and a thin brush. We remove the stabilised keys and we clean everything up then carefully reapply the lubricant in the right places and everything is perfect again.

So when we are thinking about buying a new keyboard we should first check and see if our current keyboard can still fulfil our needs with a bit of easy work performed. And this is because in time, with frequent use, the switches themselves become smoother as the plastic bits that come into contact are broken in. The unpleasant noise, the rattle – those are the poor stabilisers’ fault.

We will discuss switch ping in a future article.