This was pretty much the toughest part of the whole build. I knew it would be, it was more a matter of things no-one mentioned in any of the videos I’d watched causing me problems.   

Enough foreshadowing, on to the stabilizers. 

Keyboards have stabilizers under the wider keys. Backspace, left shift, enter, and the spacebar are the ones I needed stabilizers for on my board.They’re there to keep the key level and to make it pressable no matter where you hit it. Considering how often you hit space, backspace, shift and enter when typing, it’s easy to see why there’s such emphasis on them. 

There seems to be a consensus that you should use screw in stabilizers instead of clip-in ones; these are screwed directly into the PCB and not clipped into the plate. 

Consensus is rare in the mechanical keyboard world, so I paid attention and ordered myself some Durock V2 screw-in stabilizers. 

I’d watched many videos where people talked about the importance of modding stabilizers (or stabs as they call them). Reducing rattle by any means necessary, often using kind of weird methodology. 

There did seem to be method in the madness, so I decided to use stabilizer film on the PCB, and complement that with lubed and holee modded stabilizers.

Just like with the switches, you start by disassembling your stabilizers. Mine arrived already disassembled so I got to skip that part. The downside was that I didn’t have an assembled one to use as a reference. 

First up, the holee mod. It’s why there were fabric bandaids on my shopping list. Here’s a video from Hamaji Neo explaining how it works and how to do it.  

Essentially, you cut a tiny strip from a bandaid and use tweezers to position it along a ramp inside one part of the stabilizer. It’s there to cushion the metal prong and stop it rattling against the plastic of the back wall. I knew this would be tedious and difficult, it’s like threading a tiny needle using sticky spiderweb as your thread. The bandaid strip adheres to everything you don’t want it to, and requires much tweezing to put manners on it.

I holee modded 8 stabilizers (4 sets of 2) and still had lots of the one standard-sized bandaid I used left. You can imagine how fiddly it all got. 

Next up was lubing the stabilizer housing, then the outer walls of the little piece you see above, and the stabilizer wire.

Then I had to assemble them. Those little pieces in the photo above have one side with a stem (like the stem on a switch, it also fits into a keycap), one flat end, and two open sides. One opening is a single hole, the other has two smaller holes. These holes are, frankly, hard to see. The holee mod came in handy here since the folded over bandaid is on the two-hole side. That’s the side the wire sits into, at the back where the longer piece of bandaid is. 

You pop the inner piece into the housing, thread in the wire and then snap it in place. Repeat until you have as many completed stabilizer sets as your PCB needs. 

Next, since these are screw-in stabs, I had to screw them into the PCB. First, I put stabilizer film down where the plastic parts would rest on the PCB. So far, so good. 

Now to screw them in. With microscopically small screws that have teensy little o-rings you must attach to them. 

Counter-intuitively, you do not screw them down onto the top of the PCB. No, you screw them through from the other side. It took a solid half-hours googling for me to learn this. 

While trying to feed screws through the back of the PCB and into the stabilizer, I dropped screws many times. 

My carpet is beige, the screws were brass, I had a time of it. 

The next thing no-one seemed to mention is which direction you should orient your stabilizers in. Does the wire point towards the top or the bottom of the PCB? I put them all in pointing south because I saw a post on Reddit where someone explained that the screws go into the smaller holes on the board, and the little hooks on the stabilizers catch on to the bigger holes. I trusted Reddit. It was getting late and I was both tired and hungry. 

I just wanted to be done. 

But first, I had to test them and see how they sounded.

They sounded nice and not rattly. Yay!

All that was left to do was to remove the switches and keycaps I’d added to test, screw in the PCB to the case, add my foam and plate, pop in all the switches, add my keycaps, and plug it in. 

Ummmmm…

I kinda gave up trying to figure it out, added switches into the PCB, added keycaps, and tried it out without plugging it in. 

The spacebar and backspace were both stuck, despite them working perfectly when I’d tested them earlier. On top of that, the Capslock key was interfering with the A key, and some of the keys seemed to be sitting higher than others, and I couldn’t tell why.  

At that point, I snapped a pic for the ‘gram, put the keyboard to one side and decided that fixing those issues would be a weekend project (possibly ™ and © David Lynch, 2020).

Next up: Fixing things, a weekend project.