This product was mentioned in this week’s Top Clack. It’s a batch of 110 linear switch stems made out of UHMWE which has significantly lower coefficient of friction than POM. It’s not clear if that translates to smoother switch or not but it’s intriguing.
Pricing was reasonable but shipping cost from Australia to CONUS was too high for my taste. I hope it becomes available in CONUS soon. Since it’s made my Invyr, it may even be possible to see this stem with the new POM Panda housing.
That is the TLDR on it, but I think Zisb & Mech22 (I think that was the other person involved the OG Pandas) only went to Drop after they exhausted all other options for having the molds fixed. Basically from what I know & remember Invyr Pandas were supposed to be a super linear switch that was as smooth as possible with as tight of tolerances as possible. As we all know they fell very short of that. Although the fact that they were good tactile housings was picked up on by the community almost immediately in the form of Zandas (V1 Zealio stem with Panda housings). Which were pretty popular, but nothing like what got unleashed when the Holy Panda was discovered.
Because of all the hype around HPs, Zisb was looking to get the molds up & running again quite a while ago, but ran into many issues with that. So he finally turned to Drop since for one they own the Halo switches which are indispensable for making HPs & they had the capital + connections to get it done fairly quickly. So AFAIK it was kinda a “deal with the devil” type thing for Zisb he felt was worth it to bring HPs & Panda housings back to a decent price point. Not ideal at all, but it did work & got HPs in to the hands of many who would not have ever touched them otherwise.
Now with that accomplished I think he might be trying to seperate the Inyvr name from MD a little bit with his own products not made with MD’s help. At least that my best educated guess on the whole Invyr situation, I could be way off as I haven’t had much contact with Zisb.
I mean, if you’re looking to get something done that requires a buttload of capital, Drop is still the place to go. I have come to loathe them more and more over the years, but I don’t begrudge the designers who do work with them, you know? I can’t imagine I’d do anything different.
I 100% agree, I also am very suspect of Drops practices, but like you said if you’re a little guy & need capital to get a MKB project rolling they are the place to go. So I also hold no grudge against the designers who use them for GBs. I’ve basically just restricted my purchase through Drop to only items that can only be obtained through them. If there is somewhere else to get it I’ll go there.
I’d be curious to try these in Cream housings - I’ve not been hearing good things about the Drop/Invyr Panda housings in terms of durability, but so far my experience with the Creams is that they’re pretty resilient to yanking and pulling, even with fairly crude tools.
This material is actually used in prosthetics. But afaik it needs to be paired with a harder material to make use of its selflubrication potential. In prosthetics its usually paired with a Titanium-zirconium ceramic.
I for one, after seeing a few of the reviews that are out right now of these am really interested in these for more modding materials. I just want to know when they will be back in stock lol
UPDATE: Dang. I seem to be confusing products more often lately. Both Top Clack’s review link and force field comment was about Marshmallow switch, not UHMWPE stems. Removed the wrong link and info. Added links to more videos. It’s interesting that there are many video reviews but little or no reviews in text.