Notes on a cheap mechanical keyboard rebuild
I bought a budget keyboard two years ago and liked everything except the sound, which was somewhere between a typewriter and a tin roof in the rain. This month I took it apart.
What I did
- Swapped the stock switches for a quieter linear set.
- Lubricated the stabilisers on the long keys.
- Put two layers of painter's tape on the back of the circuit board.
- Added a sheet of thin foam under the board.
The stabilisers made the biggest difference by far. The space bar no longer rattles, and that alone was worth the evening. The tape changed the pitch a little; the foam I am less sure about.
What I would skip
I spent an hour reading about keycap plastics and then could not tell the difference in a blind test, which my flatmate found very funny. If you are doing this to a cheap board, do the stabilisers first and see whether you still care about the rest.
Total cost was less than a third of what a nicer keyboard would have been, and I know how this one comes apart now.