I’ve been trying to find a use for the 110 Halo housings I have laying around. I decided to make RGB ergo clears using the Halo housing, 68g springs and Cherry Clear stems.
Overall that combination is OK, but not great. The down stroke feels nice. There’s a little pre-travel and a sharp tactile event. The upstroke, on the other hand, is forceful, loud and jerky.
The housings seem nice, at least for a keyboard with backlight, It seems like a shame to throw them away. Has anyone found a good use for leftover Halo housings?
TBPH, not really. I have a metric shit ton of them & the only decent use I have found is making linear switches with them. The housing seems to be pretty smooth, matched with a re-tooled black stem & some nice springs they felt awesome loose. Although I am not a huge linear fan so I’ve never commited any to a build.
I used the Halo True housings and springs combined with the YOK stem and made the world’s worst linears. I think I just did what Halos are to Topre what to leaf springs. It sucks, man.
Yeah I tried Halo housings with YOK stems & found them pretty bad too. If you use a better slider they are pretty smooth, but in all honesty I really can’t recommend buying a batch of switches just to swap the stem out of them & into Halo housings.
What about Greetech Black stems in Halo housings? Some folks like the Holy Greilhs. Are the Halo housings (apart from the light guide) identical to Kailh Pro housings? Now that I think about it, I should really build some to try.
There are some differences between the Halo housings and the regular Kailh housings.
It’s not just the light pipe – some internals are different. I found this out when I put an MX Silent stem into a regular Kailh housing and was disappointed to find that the silencing pads didn’t work – some other plastic part was impacting the bottom housing first. Whereas the silencing pads did work in the Halo housing, but unfortunately it was a bit less smooth.
The Kailh housings just aren’t that smooth for some reason. However the contact leaf in both the regular Kailh and Halo housing has a pretty sharp-looking bump, so with some lube they might be given a second life with some other transplanted brown stem,.
It’s interesting that most people are using them with linear stems. I thought they would be good with tactile stems because of the leaf. The leaf definitely makes Cherry clear stems more tactile, I’m just not sure if it’s in a good way.
I have a bunch of retooled blacks, which are scratchy and have terrible spring noise, so maybe I’ll try those in Halo housings.
