Will we see revival of buckling springs in the near future?

One can hope that unicomp will one day make their SSK, but until they get new molds made or find some in a barn somewhere, I don’t think that will happen soon, unfortunately.

What’s wrong with Unicomp’s Ultra Classic? I was planning to buy one of those.

The Ultraclassic is fine, but there was a keyboard produced by IBM that was called the SSK or space saving keyboard. It’s basically a tenkeyless Model M.

It’s not super easy to find nowadays for not large amounts of money, so Unicomp making one would drive prices way down.

That’s the grey industrial model, an even harder find, but that with the normal model M coloring is the more common one.

Edit: it took me a while to understand when first looking at Unicomp’s models and hearing about SSK’s being expensive until I found out what people meant by SSK.

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Forgive me for my ignorance as I didn’t know what SSK was. Thought it was referring to Ultra Classic of Unicomp.

no, don’t worry about it. I wasn’t trying to come off as dismissive or negative. Just educating as I made the same mistake early on. Saw people talking about SSKs for $200+ and I was confused as you can get them from unicomp. Then I found out about SSK vs the UltraClassic.

Don’t feel too bad; Unicomp apparently doesn’t understand what SpaceSaver means, either.

I’ve told this story before on r/mk and Geekhack, but I got SUPER lucky back in 2007 and found a listing for the RJ45-connector IBM terminal server Model M SSK. (Part number 1392980.)

The seller had EIGHT of these amazing, super-rare, Model M space-savers. And they were listed for $25 each! I bought one, at first, because I had a hunch that I wanted to verify. I suspected that the membranes were identical to the non-terminal Model M boards, because it would be cheaper for IBM to manufacture them that way, and so I suspected that if I swapped in any normal Model M PCB for a PC, then it would work with a regular SDL cable and work on a PC.

I was right. (Which was even more thrilling because I was also working on a USB-native replacement PCB for the Model M, and it worked just as well in the 1392980 SSKs as it does in the ubiquitous 1391401!)

By the time I figured this out, though, four of the other boards were gone. So I bought the remaining three.

Yes, I managed to get FOUR SSKs for $100 combined.

You can all hate me now.

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Engage hate mode

Nah, not really. In reality, good for you. I have gotten some great deals and though I might be a bit jealous, It was a different time and I probably wouldn’t have been able to do that or known what to do in 2007. That would have been the end of year one of me being interested in mechanicals. I ruined a model M that I don’t even have anymore that I think I got for a few dollars back then. I still kick myself for not keeping it. I was just a nub and didn’t know what I was doing or what I had.

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Unfortunately, it looks like I wasn’t the only one to discover the PCB-swapping trick. I was hoping that I’d be able to amass a huge collection of 1392980s for really cheap, put my USB-native PCBs in them, and then sell them at market value (with the original PCB packaged as a separate add-in), but I never found a cheap SSK again.

Lol. Yeah, your best bet for getting an SSK for under $100 today is to find someone who doesn’t know what they have or that found 6 pallets of the things in a warehouse somewhere and bought them for cheap.

Or a thrift store or yard sale. (Unlikely as I’ve never actually bought a mech at a thrift store. Plenty of good finds, but never a mech. All my good mech finds were at an electronics surplus store.)

Edit: and even if you found the glorious 6 pallet motherlode, that person will likely sell them at market value, cause why the hell not?

Youtuber vwestlife scored an M15 for “a few dollars.”

I hate him more.

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Guys, don’t get me wrong, but every time I hear “we lost original molds” I can’t help myself but to burst in laughter. It’s the most ridiculous excuse you can make.
They just don’t care about their products.

Bare this in mind - any average plastic making company can make you molds for any shape, size or type of plastic you can possibly imagine.

I’ve had some ideas before about my own special Caps Lock key on MX stem, and German maker Signature Plastic told me they can easily make it for me. All they need would be CAD drawing and $2000.

:thinking:

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Oh! I’ve just checked, they are actually located in the US. LOL!
I honestly thought they are Germans, although I have no resonable explanation why. There has to be something… :confused:

I mean, they can have them made, sure. But I get the idea that Unicomp doesn’t have a huge margin so extra money isn’t laying around for that. And that’s $2000 for one keycap mold.

A mold that is necessary that can be used for their purposes and be used over and over again without degrading costs a lot of money. As far as I know, the molds that they’re using for the Model M boards are originals. And there’s more than just one mold.

You have front, back, barrel plate, so there’s at least three there, and IIRC, mold estimates for something that size are in the 10’s of thousands.

(I don’t know if their Space Saving (read:Ultraclassic) is an original mold, but I suspet the barrel plate is the same, saving them a lot.)

So even though there’s a lot of people that would buy an SSK from them, it may just not be cost effective to sink (estimating from what I have heard for keycap set molds and other things, so I may be wrong here but) $40000+ into it and not see that money back in the forseeable future.

Then you have personnel time and testing phases that take time. If the molds are bad, they need to be remade. There’s a lot more that goes into it than just a CAD drawing.

Yeah, you’re probably right about pretty small profit margin. And yet, they could earn more money by producing something smaller, something people actually want, but they can’t, because they don’t have money. So it’s kind of a catch 22.

Still, I may be wrong about this, but I just can’t resist the impression that their company is in mayhem. Either they make bad decisions, or - as I already said - they just don’t care.

I mean, c’mon, how hard can it be. They already have all leagal rights to produce those switches. That’s a start. They have molds to produce them. That’s a second plus. Now all they have to do is to move their asses and make some pretty cases, draw a new PCB (or maybe not even that) and lots of people would be interested. Even me. There is literally a lot LESS job than any keyboard enthusiast got through making his own keyboard.

My subjective personal opinion of Unicomp is that they like to sit down on their lazy uninterested asses and don’t have and are not willing to have any viable business model other than milking money on nostalgia as long as it goes.

This is the thing that I’m having trouble wrapping my head around.

How is it even remotely possible that Ellipse has been getting factories tooled up FROM SCRATCH, without the original molds, to make new Model Fs again in form factors that were super rare, but Unicomp, an actual business with real revenue and full-time employees, can’t reproduce the goddamn SSK that IBM made for like a decade?

I don’t have an answer for that, unfortunately. I don’t know enough about molding or Unicomp to know what the real holdup is. Obviously they could make the designs and have the molds made up as well as having the plans, etc.

—Below is speculation and genuine curiosity. If 'm wrong, feel free to correct me. I do not intend to be inflammatory or come across as angry–

Do we know how many SSK’s were actually made? Maybe there was some sort of problem with the mold near the end and it did get thrown out? Or just got thrown out in the moving of stuff from Lexmark or whoever they bought it from?

Part of what I believe likely helps with Ellipse’s model F’s is that the model F barrel plates are less difficult to do as it’s all per-key barrels. As in one mold or one mold that does 100’s of barrels isn’t as difficult to make as one whole barrel plate like the unicomp’s and SSK’s have.

The plate for that is likely then cut and bent to shape to get the weird layouts.

Reading the modelfkeyboards.com page, they mention that it’s not fused together like the model M’s are. That might actually be one of the hurdles that unicomp is facing. If they’re unwilling to go with bolted together pieces inside, they might need special molds to be able to fuse the plastic to the plate with the hammers and pcbs inside it.

Just my wild theories and trying to give Unicomp the benefit of the doubt. I think they’re mostly a small-run company that doesn’t want to take on too much. I think they are fine with where they are and aren’t looking to expand greatly from there.

bingo. tooling is the number one reason keeping them from doing this. building the right tooling is very expensive. the high quality steel needed is a huge contributor, then that steel needs to be processed to create molds. for high volume run molds gold plating might be involved which further raises mold costs.

plastics are trivial… once you have the molds. molds, however, are not trivial and require very knowledgable people and lots of money.

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Wow! I didn’t even know about this Elipse project. Looks pretty damn good. I’m impressed. Keyboard universe is so rich and diverse it never stops to amaze me.

Now, if only they had 66% layout… that would possibly be my endgame.

Luckly, we now have Norbauer and his steel cases enveloped in titanium.

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Not exactly 66% but there is an unlisted scumyc layout available that allows for 4 cursor keys:

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