I just received my Creams in the Mail yesterday and I couldn’t be more excited to get them on my board. I have some new Cherry MX gold plate stabs as well. I was reading some reviews regarding the springs in the Creams giving an odd “leathery” feel to the switch on occasion and that the stock springs just weren’t as good as, say, springs in a Cherry MX switch. Has that been the experience of anyone else with the Creams? If so, I am replacing the MX Browns on my current board with the creams and I figured I could take the springs out of the browns, place them in the creams and lube them, and go that route. Would that be a reasonable thing to do and would it improve the overall typing experience I could expect from the switch? Or is that more of a pain in the ass than it is worth? I planned to try it out with one switch and see if it made a difference, but wanted to get the opinions of folk more experienced than I.
It’s not the springs that give the leathery feel it’s actually the fact the slider & housing are both made from POM. When you slide the same material against itself there can be a stick/slip phenomena. Lubing helps tremendously with this till the switches properly break in. As far as the springs go, they weren’t too bad IME, but to heavy for my liking. I swapped spirit 63.5g springs into mine, just because I like lighter weighting on my linears. So I’d say swap the springs if you like lighter, leave them be if you’re fine with the weighting.
Gotcha, that makes a lot more sense. I appreciate the explanation. I’ll have to play around with it tomorrow before I commit one way or another. I have a long weekend so I plan to spend quite a bit of time tomorrow mix and matching until I get something I like. Looking forward to it!
what spring weights do you recommend if I find Creams and even sometimes Gateron Yellows to be tiring? I don’t have a good idea of what the weights feel like.
for reference my favorite keyboards at the moment are my 660C silenced 45g and Silent Reds on my 980M.
also how would Zeal silent linears feel compared to the rest of the switches mentioned? I’m thinking of getting Sakurios (62g), would that be a good place to start considering the factors above?
Based on your preferences, you should get spring weights that are lighter. So anywhere in the range of 55-62g, or whatever you can find.
So for my creams I got 63.5g progressive springs in them which lead to very nice light feel at the top (similar to a linear progression 55g spring) , with a slow ramping up to 63.5g bottom out after the actuation. I would highly suggest the same springs to you based on what you said. Creams stock are 70g bottom out (linear progression spring) & Gat Yellows are 60g bottom out, but they have a longer springs which almost acts like a slow curve spring making them heavier at the top than similarly weighted linear progression or progressive springs.
If you don’t want to try or can’t find progressive springs in stock at the weighting you want this is very solid advice for linear progression springs.
i just swapped in some progressive 68g springs from ThicThock for some Creams. It feels really nice. Not a side by side comparison but…I am definitely enjoying the creams more this way.
So this 55g number should be the…actuation force number when I go shop for springs?
Could you go into this more? So I don’t think the bottom out force of either of those springs/switches bother me, as I do hit those, but could it be that heavy top–>bottom movement? What about their stock springs makes it feel heavy? Is @swarley’s suggestion just to get lighter ones all throughout the movement (is that what linear progressive is?)
I also have a follow up to this: on the GK61 where I have these Yellows (alphas/numbers) and Creams (mods) on, it feels more tiring to type on them with Cherry/SS2 profile caps despite having the exact same caps on my Leopold boards. In fact, SA profile was quite nice on the Yellow-Cream board but weirder on Reds. Does cap profile have any effect whatsoever on this?
TY both btw for engaging.
No, all aftermarket springs & most switches rate their spring weight at bottom out force instead of actuation. So if you buy 55g springs that will be the bottom out weight & they’ll actuate somewhere around 10g to 15g lower (45g to 40g actuation).
The way you’ve worded it I think it could be the creams being on the heavier side all the way through & yellows being heavier at top cause of the longer spring that is bothering you. That’s why I said to try progressive springs. So to further explain spring types, a linear progression spring is just that the force curve will be a straight linear line. With progressive springs they are coiled tighter at the bottom so the force curve will actual curve up from the beginning of the keypress, they start lighter than that weighting should & then increase in weighting more quickly than linear progression or slow curved springs at the bottom to meet their stated bottom out weight. Slow curve springs will have a straight force curve like linear progression springs, but the line will be flatter on the graph as slow curved springs are longer to pre compress the spring some causing them to start off heavier & have less weighting difference between the top & bottom out.
This pic should help better explain what I’m talking about,
Ok, very sorry to hop in on this conversation and ask a newb question but from what I can see generally on switch offerings, it seems like 50-60’s are heavy and 30-40’s are lights… I think there has been only a couple of times I have even seen switches in the lower 70’s. So when I see someone talk about switches in the 60’s and refer to them as light - god it confuses me (granted that’s bottom-our force which also… seems like actuation force (or initialization force) would be a more useful number to market (I mean all three would be great but my god some times you just cant find those numbers).
Again, sorry I’m a really new and trying to find my feet on switches et al. Many thanks!
Depends on the person, also what you refer to. If you are talking about bottom out forces, for example Cherry Black are 80g. Starting from there, and keeping the same standard spring length (=same pre-load), 70g bottom-out could be qualified as “medium” and 60g “light”. Many people prefer a medium strength hence the popular 67g, 70g and 73g strengths.
Note that spring length WILL change dramatically the actuation force (as actuation happens about mid-way). Longer spring = higher actuation force. So a very long spring at 67g bottom out will have a higher actuation force, than a 73g progressive spring with a more standard length…
When in doubt, 63.5g springs