This Is highly possible as the uptick in reports of ticking & people trying to combat it has come along with the rise of JWK. Although I honestly haven’t had any problems with earlier JWK switches & even Pewters (I think Pewters & Snow Whites are the most recent JWKs I got in boards). I’m also wondering if some people are being too rough with the leaves during tuning? I’m always extra careful with open bottom housings/the leaves & when lubing them ever since Zeal pointed out how fragile they can be in GH thread years ago. So maybe that’s why I personally haven’t experienced the JWK tick yet?
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So from my experience JWK has bad ticking problems. Other switches like Cherries or Gateron would maybe have 1-2 switches that are ticking out of a batch of 100, but with JWK it could be ticking for the whole thing. I know for a fact Epsilons all ticks like crazy. And for good measure, most JWK long poles tick in my experience (I’ve had Raeds, Penyus, Tungstens, etc).
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I was very gentle and pressed down the stem before closing the housing, in my case it was Gazzew that posted a warning about damaging the leaf (on the U4Ts) when closing the housing without pressing down the stem.
Anyway here’s some examples of the sound, those are Gat CAP v2 Gold I have because my phone’s mic can’t pick up the sounds in the JWK switches.
In the Gats case I think it’s just the springs and it’s solvable, but it’s similar enough.
A squeaky or scrambling mettalic sound that can come in sync or not with the press, in the recordings it’s a clean sounding switch and then the squeaky sound:
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In switches of a different construction / configuration, I wonder if it would still be such an issue.
Imagine if more tactiles were derived directly from clicky switches, such as ones with clickbars or ALPS-style. Dampened clickies, where the tactility isn’t just derived from deviation from linear, brushing friction.
The whole spring/pole/leaf/stem deviation system seems to encourage leaf noise.
I have no experience with Alps style switches, I do have some Matias samples but no board and keycaps to test them.
On theory MX linear switches shouldn’t make any special noise, the legs are just sliding on the leaf, they’re not flicking it or moving it in any special way that should cause it to make sound.
Anyway now that you mention it, I wonder if linear BOX switches suffer from this, the casing of the leaf is also closed so even if it makes any sound, it would be a bit supressed.
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