Joint Input Club & Kono Store Statement — Box Switches & Aftermarket ABS Keycaps

I’m pretty concerned that the 1.30 mm dimension is still larger than Cherry parts and problems may come up over time.

The right thing for Kaihua to do in my mind would be to measure ~100 brand new, current tooling Cherry parts with a micrometer (reading out to .0025 mm increments vs .01 on calipers) calculate the mean and standard deviation, and set their tolerances to the mean +/- 1-3x the standard deviation. (With 2 sides of the ‘x’ to measure, that gives 200 measurements which is enough to generate real statistical conclusions.).

The Cherry switch measurements should have a bell curve to the data, and the tolerances on the box switches should replicate that.

Anything else leaves the door open for more problems later.

Someone could also do an ANSYS stress analysis of the fit between the parts to see how sensitive the stress in the keycaps is to different combinations of keycap and stem size, but really all that needs to happen is what I described above.

The WhiteFox and the Kira are great keyboard layouts BUT…Input Club had their own custom switches designed (for the 2nd time!) and no one looked at a drawing or a spec for the interface to the mating part and compared it to data on a Cherry part that it’s supposed to be a clone of. With $900,000 in Kickstarter funds between 2 major projects using this part, and thousands of switched about to be produced to go into keyboards.

What if they came in small and keycaps were falling off? What would they be telling us then?

For a solution to the Kailh drama how about a Kira w/ NIZ (Plum) electrocapacitive domes instead w/ BKE options?

NIZ also seems quite adept at cranking out new form factors including Bluetooth and RGB.

I don’t have a solid ETA on that right now. Kaihua is going to retool, but I’m not sure if they’ve decided on final dimensions yet. We’re trying to get things slowed down so we can take precise measurements and get more hard data on the whole situation. We would prefer to see a one-time change instead of two retooling efforts.

That’s a fair point — it’s one that we’re already considering (see above). We weren’t included in NovelKeys’ original dialogue with Kaihua, so now we’re trying to get more hard data and catch up with their plans.

I can assure you that loose keycaps would be noticed during Kaihua’s testing procedures. That question is basically a red herring. We wouldn’t use Box switches if they didn’t securely hold our stock keycaps.

Kaihua’s test keycaps for Box switches were likely non-enthusiast ABS gaming variants. When the Box cruciform mounts held them securely, and cracking / stretching didn’t occur, the design was likely OK’d. We also didn’t experience any of the reported issues firsthand (I:C or Kono). In fact, one of I:C’s engineers used his GMK Miami Nights set on Box switches (Hako Violets) without apparent harm.

I’m guessing that his particular GMK Miami Nights set was extra-flexible due to a certain batch of plastic. The WhiteFox / NightFox caps were fine too. Those case-by-case variations add a lot of noise to the data.

Up until now, I:C had no reason to double-check Kaihua’s stem dimensions. I:C’s engineering work was focused on the tactile elements of Hako switches (and a few custom housings). Halo switches use the 1.30 dimension, I believe, so I:C’s previous experience with Kaihua’s sizing choices was positive.

I love the idea, but that would be an even crazier delay than waiting for new Box switches to roll in.

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Since its hot swap, why wouldnt you just buy some of the new box switches when they come out and swap them in. Not really a big deal.

You wanna send me the $50-$60 to buy new switches? Believe it or not, the fact that it came with switches was a selling point for me. I can’t afford to buy everything I want so costs factor into things for me.

So, with new BOX switches already coming in for other vendors, how much of a delay would it have caused if that was the route you chose? This has my took-two-classes-of-Operations-Management-in-grad-school brain curious.

Are hako clears affected by / potentially affected by this?

I believe it does, but I’ll check the ones I have in my tester when I get home tonight. There’s another thread dedicated to the topic on the forum that goes into more detail.

Thank you!

Yes, Hako switches are impacted, and per the ohaimarks’ statements in this this thread and on the Kira Kickstarter updates, Input Club intends to ship with the ‘old’ box switches with the beyond-tolerance stems.

From earlier in this thread:

I still haven’t decided what to do about my Kira pledge. I may just cancel the entire thing, or I may order it with Speed Coppers and get some Zealios or Zilents later. This whole fiasco has me really questioning the box switches, their supposed “benefits”, and if they are really something I want to spend more money on (being stuck with a White Fox with the bad Hako Trues already).

I still think it would have been good if Input Club could have come up with some other options here, either by adding some additional non-box tactile switches to the options, delaying to get replacement switches, something. Novelkeys immediately pulled all of their inventory from sale…

TBH I just switched to bronze speed switches. I’m not willing to risk any of my keycaps (which can cost half the board or more). Luckily, I’ve never tried bronze switches so it doesn’t feel like a total loss…

As tough of a situation is with the Kira, I still don’t blame IC/Kono. This is not their fault and they are doing their best. . . At least they are trying and are engaging their customers. Kaihua on the other hand has given us very little. They are the one that should step up and resolve this.

It would be nice if they had an exchange program or the like, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

Exact timelines weren’t given to me — I’m just told that it would be a longer-than-acceptable one. Our purchasing and shipping department (which is one guy and a brand new trainee) is dealing with a huge workload right now. Getting the PO settled and dealing with various arrangements would have taken longer than in a traditional company (or a smaller one like NovelKeys), and that doesn’t even factor in rolling things out to our factories properly.

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So, since I’ve been seeing people posting about getting updated Box switches for about a week or so, is there still no possibility to get these updated switches onto the Kira? Even if you make your early October ship date, that’s still over a month out at this point. Is that not enough time to get the updated switches onto the Kira boards? It’s not like old switches will need to be desoldered…

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Now there is an official delay due to a non switch reason; further, updated switches are available. Can someone please tell me why we can’t have the updated switches for our Kira? Is it just because IC doesn’t want to incur costs? I thought it was a small expense for IC to put switches onto the Kira.

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I agree. We’re paying a pretty premium penny for the Kira. And we do it willingly, with the expectation of a keyboard as near perfect as possible. This seems to be a compromise that is a avoidable.

Please see if you can accommodate a rectification. We can handle the delay if it’s worth the wait. What’s more important is the final product.

Here’s the information that I’ve been given:

“Creating a PO, sending payment, manufacturing approximately 300,000 Box switches, packaging them, shipping them, warehousing them, and sorting them for production would create additional delays (2-3 additional weeks from PCB issues isn’t enough to make that happen given production schedules and manufacturing schedules). It’s still not viable for us to use newer Box switches with that in mind.”

Production of Kira actually takes longer due to its hot-swap sockets. Machines can’t be used during the switch installation process. They’re awful at feeling when a switch solder leg is hitting the hot-swap socket incorrectly, so that whole process is handled manually. Also, just to note this, it’s never a small expense when you’re talking hundreds of thousands of switches. Nor do we have the entire manufacturing capacity of our factories devoted to us. They’re making other things on tight schedules too, so our timelines are affected by that.

That said, everyone is welcome to swap their switches or cancel. Kira will be produced again in the future. Declining this round of production won’t leave you without one forever.

We’ve also done some internal testing by placing SP and GMK sets on pre-retooling Box switches for 2-3 week periods of time. No fitment issues or damage occurred (even when swapping from Box switches to Cherry switches). Most reports from the wild indicated that keycaps were affected within a week. We had an admittedly limited sample size, and we believe that reports of cracking and stretching in the wild are legitimate, but it shows that pre-retooling Box switches and aftermarket keycaps aren’t systemically incompatible.

We’re leaving the compatibility notes up on our site so that newcomers know what’s happening.

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Production has already been delayed though. What you really mean to say is it would hurt your bottom line too much. I’m pretty sure 100% of the community would hands down, unequivocally accept whatever delay was necessary to ship with the new box switches. This is about profit, plain and simple. Please don’t try and act like it’s not.

And not like you guys care, but the way you handled this makes me wary of ever supporting you guys again. I’ll take my business to novelkeys, or other vendors who put customer service before profit.

@rockway that’s exactly why. They don’t want to pay for New switches when they’ve already ordered the old ones. They’d rather sell us the old ones than be stuck with useless defective switches. Great business strategy, if you want to join the ranks of “profits first, customer last.”

Would’ve expected that from massdrop, not input club.

Did you actually read any of the response pointing out why this wasn’t viable? If it was just time spent on their end, them just popping out to grab 300k switches from the nearest bin, then it’d be simple enough. But in this case they’d have to deal with securing a slot in Kailh’s production timeline as well as waiting for the production itself to happen. When Mike has to restock switches it’s usually a few weeks to a month or so wait on some of them, and I’m sure he’s not ordering 300k at a time, so I’d imagine the production itself for that many switches would be several weeks to say to say the least, but only once they get in on a production slot. Then you’ve got to deal with assembly for all the boards that are using these new switches, which at that point they’re most likely past their allotted time slot for for use of the facility and have to wait for the next available one to pop up. Trying to do this would lead to cascading delays throughout several parts of production of the boards and would likely result in entirely unreasonable delays throughout, which could easily run into issues with the FTC’s Prompt Delivery Rules and cause even more problems overall.

But nah, go ahead and ignore all of that and just accuse people that are trying to bring something cool to the community, and introduce others to the community, of caring only about profit. I’m sure you know more about it than anyone there that’s actually had to do the math on this.

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