Here is a small tutorial of setting up Costar stabs.
For the plastic inserts , be sure to clean them well of any lube that might got there or in the keycap stem. It’s interesting as I had different Costars stabs and only encountered that looseness in a WASD board as well as you. At that time I used small pieces of paper to make them sit snug ( take out spacebar, insert paper+plastic insert,mount spacebar into the wire and then put in position)
You could also hunt down or ask @ for some extra inserts, they came with some JTK sets at one point and they’re also available on aliexpress type websites among the stabilizers.
Back in like 2015 I wished every board used costar stabs. I found them (once installed…) to be much less finicky and superior at stabilization when compared to Cherry stabs.
The state of the art in lubing and proliferation of screw-ins has caused me to reevaluate Cherry stabs somewhat.
Not sure if this qualifies, but I’ll probably never see full cherry coverage, though I think the mini ADA keycaps, actually blend quite nicely, with the Cherry profile alphas.
I modded the GHB keys, with a dremel, using a cone shaped carbide bit.
The ADA keycaps are sturdy, but they really need to move to a double shot system, once they can afford the tooling. The infill, was starting to develop a gray tint on the WASD cluster, but held up fine every where else… Kind of odd, if you ask me. Note, I don’t type with dirty hands, so I’m assuming, that the issue, was one of sweat or finger oils and pressure from gaming, that was causing the discoloration. Will have to post a pic later.
I actually like the way the mix of ADA and Cherry profile look together. just couldn’t deal with the ADA WASD keys having a gray tint. From a laid back position, it was super noticeable and wouldn’t clean up with isopropyl.
The Video is pretty boring. just me digging out the infill. The infil does go pretty deep.
The keycaps, were worse then I remember. The infill looks ok in bright light, but in normal to dim light, it loos pretty gray. Pretty much all of the alpha’s were starting to show the gray… I wonder why infill isn’t done in a better material, it seemed chalky and kind of chipped away.
I was working from home, and my keyboard saw 8-16 hours of use per day, for about 2-3 weeks, before I did the EnjoyPBT swap.
