Just thought I’d share with you my UHK with these new tecsee medium tactile switches that are doing the rounds at the moment - they seem to be getting a bit of interest in the ergo mech keyboard world.
It’s quite hard to see from that photo, but they’re quite low profile, but they work with your existing boards and keycaps. The keys are sat quite lower than normal, and for me it feels really nice - more like a apple keyboard I suppose.
My only issue is some of the keys are quite loose - the H key in particular keeps falling off!
This is encouraging to see, I went looking a while back for MX-socket and keycap compatible low-profile switches and wasn’t able to find anything. It looks like everyone stocking the Gazzew and Tecsee are out of stock, hopefully other manufacturers will start producing these as well.
One thing to note - you also need to get some low profile stabilisers. I’ve got some, but I’m scared to fit them to this keyboard, so the right shift and control are still on old switches.
@Matt_Roberts, just installed a set of these and really enjoying them. Did you manage to find compatible stabilizers? The tecsee ones I found are meant to snap into the PCB, not the plate. I’ve also tried modifying the stock ones with no luck
@Zetaphor - That’s a shame… So I went a different direction in the end. I got some Tecseee V3 stabilizers, but I had an annoying issue where the keycaps for me kept popping off on the ultimate hacking keyboard. So in the end, I used the low profile switches and stabilizers on my other keyboard (I have a Keychron Q10 also that I sometimes use) - the V3 Tecsee stabilizers were OK to fit to that.
I would have assumed though that they’d just fit to the UHK too - but I’ve never done more than change switches on that, I’ve never tried to dismantle the whole thing to put different stabilizers on.
Bought the Tecsee tactile switches on Amazon. Absolutely love the feel and increased ease of typing that comes with the shorter travel distance.
Some of the keys are extremely loose as others have stated. I had about 7 keys that would fall off without any encouragement just from turning the keyboard upside down, but if your keyboard is mostly staying stationary then that’s probably not too big of an issue. I did find I was able to keep the loose keys solidly in place by inserting a small paper shim into the key cap socket.
As for the stabilizers, I just removed those entirely. The keys are stable enough on their own that I don’t notice their absence and it’s worth it to not have a few keys that are raised a bit higher than the rest.
Hopefully we’ll eventually see some low profile switches that fit the key cap more snugly in the future, but in the meantime I’m really happy with these.
For the loose caps, I found that trying out different switches (assuming you have spares) helps. The tolerances between them can vary and so some will grip tighter than others.
I’ve actually now also installed a set of low profile keycaps:
I’m trying to find the mod cap set, but the only seller I’ve found that claims to have them in stock wants $30 to ship a $20 product, so maybe I’ll just stick with the stock 1.25U and 2U keys for now.
@Zetaphor Just curious, did you stick with this layout, how’s it working out for you? Also was wondering if you also fitted the tecsee stabilizers too?
@Matt_Roberts Still using it and loving it. I may get some low profile keys for the modifiers, but I’m still undecided. I’m actually thinking about putting full size caps back on the top key of the key cluster as I sometimes bump the bottom left key when I hit the top one.
I didn’t end up using the stabilizers, as the ones I bought were meant to be installed directly on to the PCB, not the slot-in style that this board uses. If I do replace the modifier keys I plan to just not use stabilizers.
