Mostly finished cleaning these up and today was cool compared to the last few days so I figured it was a good time to get some pictures in the nice outdoor light.
Left to right we have a FK2001 clone for an unknown system made by (presumably) Long Island, a NOS FK2001 (not a clone) with a Comtex badge, and a FK2001 clone that came with a famiclone.
The Great Wall board is neat and I got is in part of rthe badge but also because it initially came with MX blues which was kinda funny to see in a focus clone. I've seen similar boards with MX blacks in them which are even funnier since they aren't even clicky. I eventually want to get one of those since the MX blacks have a chance (albeit a slim one) of being good. While the badge has Great Wall branding, the PCB lists it as a long island 102 and the back label indicated that's who made it as well. There's a ton of Great Wall stuff out there and none of it looks like it was made by them so whatever this Long Island company is they likely made it, or at least made the internals. The lid here is not original but is from a proper fk2001. I have never seen one of these clones with so much as the clips on and I wouldn't be surprised if they never came with them. Pairing it with the MX based clone instead of the proper FK2001 seemed like the thing to do, if I ever get a chance to bring all 3 to a meetup I'm sure this'll throw people off for sure
And here we have the switches I replaced the MX blues with, kailhistotles. These were specifically pro purples so they're a bit heavy but still rather nice. I happened to have the aristotle stems as part of a haul of assorted shit boards and the kailh housings/springs were left over from a prev project when I was first getting into the hobby so I figured if I didn't use the kailh parts I probably never would. Had I not used them I likely would have made gatistotles w/ gat yellows. Regardless they're nice enough switches, the aristotle stems are likely the best sort of click jacket you can get and I wanted to keep the click jacket since these used MX blues initially, it seemed the only just way to bring new life to this board was to embrace the jank lol.
Most of the caps are doubleshot with the exception of the "Compose", "Lock", and "Del" keys on the bottom row. I cannot tell if the 2ndary legends are also doubleshot or if they are printed. The raised pad print on the bottom row keys is easy to feel but the 2ndary legends cannot be felt so my assumption is they are doubleshot. Very nice cap set for sure.
The protocol for this board is unknown to me, presumably is uses something somewhat standardized but I do not possess the language skills to learn about it nor the skills to reverse engineer it. Hopefully someone from that part of the world who is interested in keyboards will stop by DT (or any part of the english internet really) and share their knowledge about these so a converter can be made.
The proper Focus is the same one that I posted about in this thread. It's got white alps and is a fairly standard board in all respects. I like it quite a lot but I tend to use my omnikey 102 more when I want white alps since I like having LH Fkeys.
And the Famclone board, the most interesting of the clones I've seen so far. It's for a faliclone for starters, which is wild, not all the switches are connected to the matrix (a common theme with famiclone board, and the switches that aren't connected appears to be consistent across boards) the switches were some cheap alps clone but they had full size copper click leaves. I initially was thinking of restoring them but I have so many salmon alps laying around so I instead transplanted the leaves into some salmons, waxed the sliders, and lubed the tracks in the housing with dielectric grease. The result is a very tactile click in a buttery smooth switch. Absolutely excellent switch. And on top of that the caps are the same sort of thick cap of the same sort as my JTC102 (which I've been meaning to restore for ages and keep putting off) and my Golden Key. They're thick but not well made, especially the R0 caps.
As you can kind of see here, although it's very faint, that there is a smooth 2 and 3 vaguely showing on the cap, meaning that these R0 keys are repurposed from other molds. What likely happened is they took a mold that could make a bunch of F3s and F2s and made it spit out a full board's worth of R0 keys instead. Kinda weird that the Fs don't line up though. I've seen this with other R0 keys of this sort but only in the doubleshot ones, the pad print R0 that I've seen doesn't have this issue. No idea honestly.
The legend thickness on these caps is sometimes funky, they have weird flashing sometimes, and the molding is clearly a quick retrofit of existing molds but boy do they sound nice. These caps and switches combine into a very nice sounding keyboard.
I was going to put the lid on this board, but the R0 caps are too tall and the lid doesn't close all the way as a result, which is hilarious.
the space bar rod stabs are cool, pink and purple. nice.
The PCB is pretty terrible, with the switch footprints slightly too close together so that as you move from the left hand side to the numpad the pins start to line up with the pads less and less. For clones this isn't an issue since the pins are thinner and more flexible, but for proper alps it meant that I had to do some light surgery to get them to actually fit. They also get the chevrons mixed up on the silk screen. The PCB is a decently tidy thing otherwise with just KCKB--92 as any sort of model number/branding. It also says "DESIGNED BY OU SHAOJIA & CHEN YONGSONG" as well which is super cool to see, love seeing evidence of personal touches on vints like this.
All in all these clone boards are very interesting to me. They tend to have weird things in them since they're not exactly super legit. I'm still after a dec layout FK2001 clone if I can find one in decent shape as well as a few of the weirder boards that aren't exactly clones but have copied the logo style of the font that focus used on their lock light stickers because they *feel* like focus jank even though their jank is of an entirely different sort. I want to have a large collection of what looks like unique focus boards at first glance that turns out to be shoddy trash on close inspection. All these boards, on top of being aesthetically similar, have this sort of weirdness that comes from not knowing anything about the market and time period they hail from. Weird machines that take cassettes, floppies, and famicom carts all at the same time, things with built in keyboards that don't even use all the switches, all sorts of weird early computing and industrial stuff so close to the companies that manufactured the good stuff. All of it's interesting even if basically none of it is good.