Nice. I ordered mine on the last day possible. It becoming a kind of ritual strategy for me now so I pace myself and not order ALL THE CAPS.
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That looks wonderful. Sorry about your trouble thoughâŚ
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I hear ya. I have KAT Space Cadet, EPBT Ivory, and KAM Little Pilot I am still waiting on but Space Cadet doesnât ship till maybe end of December, Ivory doesnât ship till maybe end of September, and now Little Pilot has been pushed back till at least October. It is one of those forget you bought it and be surprised when it shows up situations LOL
Iâve got a spreadsheet going with at least 35 rows of all my random orders; caps, cables, boards, random parts⌠before I had it, it got so bad that I forgot what I had ordered. I ended up with 2 sets of tangies, 2 sets of GMK Honeywell and 3 AEKs. Those were chaotic times in my marriage 
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Well TBF other than the double sets of GMK Honeywell I see nothing wrong with owning a ton of Tangies & multiple AEKs (lord knows I do too!). Although I completely get it bud, happy wife = happy life! 
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And now for something a little different⌠Got my Mahjong in today! I donât think many people knew about this board because of the limited quantities (50 total in this first Rd.) & some, well strange design choices TBH. I passed on it at first, but got in very late when the runner rolled over the unpaid invoices.
What makes it kinda strange? Well the two things that really stood out to me was the fact it is a hot swap PCB, but you need to solder the sockets on yourself & it only uses plate mounted stabs. Both choices I would not have made, but I think the designer was more making this for himself than for others. Overall though those were not enough to kill my interest, especially at the pricing ($250 for the kit & shipping). Getting ready to build it up now, will report back later to let you guys know how it goes!
All built up for now. I just tuned the stabs & threw some stock Tangies in it for now, till I decide what switch I want in it for sure. Next thing for this is figuring out to properly reprogram it. The designer said it should be done through QMK on the KB firmware builder site, but there is no template for this board yet. Gonna whip a json up in KLE & hope for the best using that site to turn it into a hex file.
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Love the weight
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Whatâs your go-to for those? I rarely encounter this option since PCB mount stabs are so prevalent.
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Genuine Cherry plate mount stabs are my goto in a situation where I have to use plate mount. TBH, they are the only plate mounted stabs Iâve used that arenât total trash. I think some of the prebuilt companies have upped their stab game, but those stabs are not available to buy by themselves AFAIK.
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Good to know. Many thanks!
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NK Dry Yellows arrived.
PS: It feels and sounds almost as nice as is as lubed and filmed Mauve. Hmm. I think they improved the plastic a bit. Mauve plastic feels cheap and hollow. This one is less so.
UPDATE1: These switches donât need filming. Film may actually detract from from feel and sound of the switch if you like firm feels and solid sounds. And unfilmed NK Dry wobbles less than filmed Mauve. I think NovelKeys hit one out of the park with this one.
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Its a lovely board!
Nice brass weight, looks like the case is power coated.
The price is damn low, looks a very good purchase 
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Good to hear, I got a batch of dry yellows in the mail right now!
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Thanks! Yeah for the price I couldnât pass it up a second time when I saw there were a few spots left to fill. Pretty happy with it so far, gotta get some properly tuned switches in it soon to really see how good it can get!
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Whatâs your take on brown alps?
I have some but Iâve never built with them. I almost used them in the M0110. They felt and sounded really good to me. A bit stiff but they felt like a cross between a lubed holy panda switch and topre. However, I eventually decided on blue instead since I donât have many clicky keyboards anymore.
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Two long awaited things arrived these days:
- MT3 Susuwatari arrived earlier last week (ordered in October 2018)
- Rama U80-A (Moon Grey) arrived today (ordered in July 2019)
And since the colors are quite close, I just combined them for a beginning:
In the back of that potato shot (which definitely doesnât show the unfussy glamour of thhe U80-A) you see the Vortex Tab90M with GMK Oblivion Git Kit which I used the past two weeks while working from home. (And no, that tiny 7" screen is not my only screen, there are three 23"/24" screens in the back, too. Currently it just shows mpv used as MP3 player. 
I usually have it in middle of the keyboard, but since the U80-A has its USB-C socket centered in the back, I had to move it a bit aside.)
Iâm really happy with the U80-A, despite there were a few minor issues which I expected to not happen with a Rama keyboard:
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There were two differently sized Torx wrenches included. One, the smaller one, started spinning in the screws after very few screws. One end was no more usable.
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The assembly instructions are often unclear. They mostly describe the order and which parts are involved, but not how to actually put them together. Like e.g. it was not mentioned in which directions spacers or the USB-C daughterboard needs to be mounted.
Also the LEDs are initially set to very bright which is annoying when youâre going to test switches before mounting keycaps.
And I havenât found any documentation on the default layout/keybindings and hence how to change the RGB settings. Took the one from the M60-A and by chance that happily worked at least for the RGB control of the U80-A, tooâŚ
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Case fits too tight for my taste. Had several times hassles to actually get top and bottom to properly slide into each other.
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The included Durock stabs have enough clearance so that you can assemble them with the stem in the wrong direction while still being able to move them (until you put the wire in, then theyâre stuck).
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One of the rubber feet bands (rubber feets which go over the whole width of the keyboard) was about 2mm too short and is now not properly centered. But the glue on it was superb. Wasnât able to remove and center it properly. The other one fit perfectly. No gaps left.
But as mentioned, Iâm still happy with the board as most of the above issues only showed up during assembly. So on the positive side we have:
- Perfect surface finish
- Heavy weight
- Unfussy designâmaybe even a bit too unfussy as you canât see the polished weight while sitting in front of it typing. Some LED indicators couldnât have hurt IMHO either. Wouldnât have wanted any fancy LED indicators, though.
- Obviously a lot of thoughts have flown into details.
- Well packaged (but one of two outer security seals was scrubbed of. Doesnât look as if happenend manually, more like due to too tight outer packaging â still no signs of tampering on the other one, so the box hasnât been opened by customs or so)
- The whole board is rather well dampenedâexcept the spacebar which is noisy as hell. Will probably be the first board where Iâll try a bandaid mod, hotglue mod or similar. Otherwise it would have been office-capable out of the box (with the Gateron Silent Ink switches included in the U80-A starter kit).
- Can be used as weaponâif you can lift it quick enough.
Iâm also still unsure if Moon Grey was the right choice over Kuro Black. But I already have quite a few black keyboards. And the grey color hopefully works with both, bright and dark key caps sets, i.e. should colorwise work with more key cap sets than just dark key cap sets. (Basically that argument tipped the scales at the end between those two colors.)
Also a note about MT3 Susuwatari:
MT3 Godspeed was my first MT3 set and kinda wasnât too happy with the profile. Funnily itâs different now with Susuwatari, but Iâm not sure why:
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I had MT3 Godspeed mostly on 40% keyboards so far. But with MT3 the switch from downwards to upwards slant is not at row 3 (which is even with e.g. SA or IIRC also KAT, but between row 2 and 3. And since 40% keyboards usually just have rows 2 to 5, with MT3 they have 3 rows with a downwards slant and just a single row with an upstream slant. MT3 Susuwatari on a TKL is symmetrical â 3Ă downwards slant (R3-R5), 3x upwards slant (R0-R3) â and hence optically and may even for the fingers more pleasing.
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MT3 Godspeed is made of PBT with dye-subbed legends and rather rough surfaces, MT3 Susuwatari is double-shot ABS and smoother surfaces. And so far I have only one PBT key cap set which I prefer over most of my ABS sets: Tai-Hao double-shot PBT OEM Orange and Black.
Regarding PBT key caps and not so thrilling:
Especially the reverse dye-sub Infinikey PBT Sanctuary Rebirth key cap set (which arrived about a month ago) was disappointing as it has a lot of red light-bleeding (sic!) under the black dye-subbed key caps of red PBT:
Shown on a Varmilo VA87M with white LEDs as backlight. Please note the second FXI (F11) key instead of the FX (F10) key. I wonder who instead got the FX key twice.
Also the one end of the spacebar worked loose within a few hits on either end â and stayed the same end of the space when I turned it around (as seen on the picture), so itâs not the stock stabs of the Varmilo board. I was though surprised to hear that Iâm the only one who argued about that so far and was just offered a spacebar from a spare set â which I doubt that it will be better.
Another thing that I noticed with that key cap set is that I donât seem to be able to type numbers blindly on at least a normal layout. Found myself way to often calculating numbers out of the roman numerals. (âIs VII now 7 or 8?â)
Oh, and one more recent-ish key cap set, arrived about 1.5 months ago: Melgeek MG Ember, shown on my âswitch bitchâ, a GMMK TKL barebone:
I really like that profile. Itâs kinda closer to SA than KAT, but less tall than SA and also with sharper edges around to top compared to SA. Looking forward to see more key cap sets with that profile.
Maybe I should try MG Ember on the U80-A. But for now, MT3 Susuwatari will stay on it for a while to get more experience with it.
EDIT: Looking at these pictures myself, it seems as if Iâm back in a TKL period of mine.
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