Stabilizers

You don’t have to mount the stabilizers at this stage, but I found it useful because it let me confirm my layout.

Mounting the stabs

You might have meddled with stabilizers before, but for the purposes of building a board you need to know what type to use and where to put them. You need five sets of stabs, and for this build you’ll need PCB mount Cherry MX levelling mechanisms.

The keys I stabilized are:

Left shift

Spacebar

Right shift

Enter

Backspace

Look at the reverse of the PCB to see the key names to find the holes for the stabilizers. There should be two sets of large and small holes for each one.

Assemble the stabilizer before pushing it into the PCB. It should look like this:

Assembled stabilizer, from Deskthority

The large feet at the front slide into the larger hole in the PCB, then the small foot at the back pops in. The metal bar should be inserted with the legs pointing up, like this:

Stabilizer from Deskthority

The metal bar will clip into the bottom.

Here’s what it looks like with the plate and stabilizers:

PCB, plate, and stabilizers in place

Removing stabilizers

If you push the stabilizers into the wrong place, it doesn’t really matter. The smaller feet with a gap in the middle can be squeezed together from the bottom of the PCB, and it should lift out. Don’t use too much pressure.

Here’s the part you need to squeeze:

Press to remove

Soldering

Get your soldering iron heated up, and a solder mat to work on. I leave the solder mat to the side with the soldering iron and tools like the desolder pump, then put the board on something soft like old cardboard. This is to stop the plate’s acrylic getting scratches on little bits of solder on the solder mat.

Soldering switches

The next thing I did on my build was solder the switches. At first I soldered batches of five switches and tested them, but I quickly got confident enough to solder entire rows.

WARNING: Make sure you know what modifier layout you want! The board’s markings for 6x space and W/L WK are a little confusing. Try attaching the modifier keycaps that you want to use to switches to make sure they all line up and fit!

Soldering and testing as I go

Each switch has two component legs and a large plastic mount leg. Push the switch through the plate into the PCB — it should clip into the plate. The orientation is pretty obvious because the switch has a Cherry logo:

Cherry switches go in one way

Place the soldering iron on one side of the leg to steady the iron, and apply solder. You should see molten solder go through the hole to the other side of the PCB, then well up slightly around the leg.

Soldering the modifiers is slightly harder

Soldering larger modifiers is slightly harder because some won’t lock into the plate — they’ll fall out when you turn the board over to solder. I used an elastic band to hold them in place, but there’s probably a better way to do it. Maybe a small amount of sticky back plastic?

Soldering in-switch LEDs

In-switch LEDs should be pushed through the switch, plate, and PCB. The longer leg is positive, so you can verify if the LED is the right way by looking at the positive and negative markings on the reverse of the PCB. Bend the legs very slightly to hold them in place. I found bending too much resulted in cold solder joints: the solder wouldn’t flow very well through to the other side of the board, so it made a poor connection.

Solder one LED first to test.

Then keep going! It doesn’t take as long as you think.

Clip the legs with a flush electronics clipper, and you’re done.

Testing

Now your LEDs and switches are soldered, you’ll need to test the board. I incrementally tested switches and LEDs in batches of one row, but I still tested again before assembling the case.

When testing, make notes of the failed switches. You might notice a specific switch keeps failing. In cases like that I desoldered and resoldered.

If you’re not great at soldering yet, making notes about the failed joints will help you from feeling too overwhelmed when things go wrong.

Testing switches

There are two apps that I’m aware of for testing switches, Switch Hitter and Aqua’s KeyTest.

I used Switch Hitter. I pressed each key on the keyboard and found a few dead switches. I made a note of each one, then checked the soldering. The solder had balled up on the switches, meaning I’d made cold solder joints. I heated the solder and tested again, and in some cases desoldered then resoldered.

Switch Hitter can help you find switches that aren’t seated properly but still make a viable electrical connection, so these should be fixed as well. It’ll show the key ‘stuttering’ in such cases, particularly if slight pressure is applied during typing.

Testing with Switch Hitter

Testing LEDs

The easiest way to test LEDs is to use the BootMapper Client provided by Winkeyless. There’s a shortcut for turning on the LEDs (I think it’s caps-lock and escape), but I found the software worked better.

I had two LEDs with cold solder joints, so I fixed those the same way as the switches.