Changing out my key switches

Posted on 2022-12-28 in misc • 2 min read

When I bought my new Keychron K8 pro keyboard, I was stuck between choosing the "red" or "brown" switches. Based on many things I found around the web, it seemed like the brown ones would suit nicely. When I got my keyboard, I fell in love with the feel of the keys, and the pleasant sound of the keystrokes. My wife? Not a fan of the clicking the browns made. My consolation of "it's way better than the blue switches" was not well received.

So for Christmas she got her (er, I mean me) a set of "silent red" switches.

On Christmas day, I swapped out all the switches on my keyboard and tried out the new red ones. They are different. I didn't hate them, but I didn't love them as much as I did the brown ones. But there was a "critical" problem. The housing for the silent red switches didn't have any pass through for the LED lights underneath. So only two tiny pinpoints of light were visible. This isn't a huge problem, because I really didn't care too much about the RGB backlighting, but reasoned that I did pay for it, so I should be able to see it.

Note

The pictures in this post were taken on my phone, and looked fine there. They are not fine. They are blurry and crappy, but I already had everything put back together, so I couldn't retake them. They are good enough to get the point across, but I am aware; they suck

First Attempt

My existing brown switches had a clear top housing. I initially thought that I could just swap the top housing and all would be good. But, as I mentioned above, I discovered that it was actually the bottom housing that was blocking the light. So I decided to Frankenstein all the components around.

comparison image of two switch housings

Trading Pieces

What I ended up doing was swapping the red stem and spring in the black housing with the brown stem and spring in the white/clear housing.

So I took the insides of the new switch:

gateron red switch

Swapped it with the insides of my old/original switch:

gateron brown switch

and created this:

my custom mix of the two switches

This allowed me to get the silent switches my wife liked, and still keep the RGB visibility. Since I had all the switches apart, I lubed each switch (which the red ones did not come pre-lubed, and it made a huge difference in overall smoothness). It took me close to 8 hours to do all of it, but I am overall pretty happy with the results.