Decided to throw these in my hotswap board & give them a try stock. I’ve been using them for almost an hour now & my impressions are positive so far! Slightly scratchier than most high end linears, but very similar scratch to any other Gat yellow I’ve tried. The springs feel a bit heavier than their stated 63g bottom out to me. Although a 63.5g progressive spring is the heaviest one I’ve been using lately so it may just be me there. The sound is great IMO! I have them on a CF plate right now & they have a nice thock to them, but still lean towards the more poppier side of the sound spectrum. With lube these will be a fairly deep sounding switch I think.
Not sure I want to put these in my 8X MkII now that I find they feel a little heavier than I expected, but will be lubing these up & keeping them in my test board for now. I’ll update this post after I do it!
I wanted to try polishing Cap switches so went to NovelKeys to order a Cap Gold set ($18) and a Cap Yellow set ($12), totaling $30 but backed out after noticing that cheapest CONUS shipping option available is USPS Priority Mail at over $10.
No thanks. I’m not exactly dying to polish switches.
I do note that the new 35 switch sets go pretty well with 60% hotswap boards since you can put Cap Gold on alphas and Yellows on the rest then switch the sets later.
I’d be proud of these too if I were Gateron… but I totally agree about the packaging. At least have the overdone display box as a possible option rather than the only one. It’s cool if you could use a switch tester, but otherwise a massive waste of plastic and shipping resources. Even just using a recycled paperboard version of the packaging could go a long way.
As far as I can tell, the Golds are basically a “special edition” alternate color. Like the housings, the springs are supposed to be the same spec, just with a molecular-layer of gold coating them. I’ve seen in some sound tests that their respective faint pinging isn’t the same between them, but it’s a pretty trivial difference.
Other than polishing, one hack Gateron Cap design makes me want to try is grounded down a bit of the the flat top surface of housing pole then coated it with liquid latex for silencing or other types of materials for different sound.
I say go for it. However, what you’re going to get is a 1/2 and 1/2 switch. It feels weird to have a silent switch on the way down and a clack on the way up.
I received mine in the mail from Novelkeys yesterday! Initial impressions from pressing a switch 1-5 times in its packing before having to put it away and focus on other tasks was positive
So I think I’ve at least partially solved the mystery of Caps’ weird packaging.
Small amounts of lube can come out of the air port - so storing them in a bag, jar, or anything else that has them on top of each-other will mean some likelihood of slimy switches in the future. (I found this out the practical way…)
U4T’s on the left, Caps on the right. If you look close, you can see the right side has lube on the bottom of the drawer while the left side is clean. I put these in at the same time, having gotten both from @davisthegreat.
So - a word of advice to anyone that buys these thocky bois - keep the crate.
