I’ll need more time to fully evaluate. Here’s what I noticed from a few installed in a hotswap board.
Sound is low pitch and thocky like a 205g0 lubed switch.
Wobble is better than Gateron Hippos and similar to more recent Gateron offerings.
Almost all wobble is in the North/South directions. East/West is quite good.
-top wobble is a B+
-travel is the same, B+
-bottom out wobble is a B
I’m VERY picky about wobble, so keep that in mind. If I give an A grading, that means no wobble at all. Most Gateron switches would earn at B or worse on wobble from me. These seem a bit better.
The stems are NOT undersized! Holy heck. This is a miracle. Are the stems really UMWPE?
The switches are smooth when typing, but… There is stick slip on slow press, especially on off-center presses. That’s very interesting to me. The top is supposed to be nylon and bottom ink material. I’m thinking the stem might have a lot of nylon in it. I know my all Nylon ice candy switches had a LOT of stick slip.
The stick-slip on these Gateron UMHknown is not trivial. It’s adds a unique feel to the switch. I haven’t decided if I like it or not. I also haven’t tried additional lube.
Very timely. Had a set in cart. Like switches with POK material, going to wait for more peer feedback and sound tests. Vendor supplied sound test didn’t sound that thocky and even had weird sticking noise.
No surprise, lubrication didn’t really alleviate the stick-slip. It might be a bit better, but still there. I think people looking for a UMWPE switch are probably looking for a very silky-smooth experience. You won’t find that in this switch. I’m still on the fence, but my instincts are telling me to not solder these into a board. I’ll be using them in a hotswap on and off, I imagine. They certainly feel different from any Gateron switch I own (and I own a plethora). But these are not the silky/gliding “umwipe” experience I was hoping for. The stick-slip is too present in all methods of typing.
Ha. Love it. Reminds me of one of those TG3 Cop keyboards. I have one in the closet somewhere. Except those use all uniform R5 instead of R3 DCS. I need to design a new board around it!
Not sure where mine is, but here’s what it looks like:
They are surprisingly pleasant to type on, except for the concave spacebars (a problem SP has with all DSA and DCS spacebars below 6u… they only recently got small convex SA spacebars).
Thanks! Several ePBT sets have 2x1.75 in the spacebar/40s kit as well, but support for it is dwindling. It’s an old layout from 2015 (JDCarpe’s JD40/45).
Most of my jar stickers come from Redbubble, a print-on-demand website. All the designs are from users - there’s lots of copied stuff alongside the original work, but the selection is cornucopious - so it’s a great place to find stuff that fits a specific theme.
Not yet - but I can give you some first impressions of the TTC Old School linears. They’re intended as tributes to the MX Black, but definitely aren’t clones of them. For one thing, they’re not full-travel. In terms of stock and compared to the Cherry, there’s less scratch, less metallic noise of all kinds, more stability, and a louder clack. These are definitely Nylon switches, but don’t have as much obvious Nylon character as the Cherries.
Compared with a TTC Wild (another TTC linear that also has a Nylon bottom and similar stem, but a PC top), they’re very similar. The clack is slightly higher-pitched but also a little bit more clean. (I think their factory lubing has improved.) A little bit less metallic noise. I’d say these are pretty familiar to other TTC shrouded-stem linears. They’ve got the thick lens diffuser that some of the others don’t, so that’s a distinction.
I think they’re very solid, good switches. That said, there’s a pair of pretty recent all-Nylon linears I can think of that I like a bit more: Moondrop Lunalights and G-Square EMT V2s, both made by Haimu. They have an even tastier clack to my ears.
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