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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You should try the leaf shroud mod.
What could be used instead of the films? Deskeys films are no longer made out of foam.
This is what I do to eliminate leaf spring even on tactile switches:
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I just noticed this today about Deskeys films. I haven’t used them in a while but when did they change?
No idea, but I went to purchase them for this mode and noticed they’re made out of plastic
made an account just to vent because I recently went in on two tubes of the v1 linears (price was good and three youtube reviews didn’t mention anything that would turn me off to these) and now I wish I hadn’t.
before buying these, I never tried any jwk manu’d switches. only ever use ttc, gateron, sp star, and broken in cherry.
my first build was in a frog mini hotswap. I lightly lubed and filmed the v1’s and they actually feel really good, they just pinged and ticked like no other.
second build was in a cw88, soldered build this time. I liked the feel of the switches so much I guess I just took a chance on the sound issue thinking maybe it was something with the previous batch or (very unlikely) my lubing.
nope, same issue with the noise. I won’t be using jwk manu’d switches anymore. it’s frustrating that this is an issue on a ‘modern’ switch regardless of the price. hopefully the noises will reduce some over time with use…
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- Take off switch top.
- Make sure you have pneumonia or something.
- Open wide.
- I don’t know.
- Tada!
Jk jk. Some leaves suck, usually they’re ok in my case.
I’ve been facing the same issue but instead of the leaf pinging it’s crunching, I have this issue with my Mx blacks after i diamond polished them,
I have been meaning to try this with my jwk switches. I have a ton of left over film parts, I just haven’t got around to installing and testing it yet - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzrW-tPnEVo
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i got rid of the V1 leaf tick by lubing the leaf contact points, so it’s probably one of the better JWK switches. with that being said, i don’t ever buy JWK switches anymore because of the stem wobble noise present in maybe half the switches (e.g., in the original Alpacas or "V2"s) the high-pitched ticking noise is particularly apparent when you lightly tap the keycaps on the edges and very unpleasant. unfortunately that is not fixable by any modding method i have tried (including leaf shroud mod, filling top housing cavity with dialectric grease, lubing leaf, generous lubing, etc.). i’m guessing it happens because of the loose tolerances (hence the smoothness) leading to the stem banging against the top housing or somewhere else. to back it up, my 2m broken-in cherry mx blacks don’t have any ticking if they are only actuated straight up-down; however, the RNDKBD ones which also include oblique actuations introduce significantly more stem wobble and such ticking noise in about 1/3 to 1/2 the switches.
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