It's A Keyboard [KFNR standard and compact]
Posted: 03 Jan 2023, 05:35
This is simply the best keyboard that has ever been produced, full stop. I don't know why anyone kept making new designs after this.
Some of the stuff inside the box that wasn't a keyboard:
So here she is removed from the case as much as I can get it. This appears to be a laptop keyboard module that's been glued into the case and as such I can't disassemble further. If I had another one of these laying around I might try to use heat to loosen the glue and get it apart that way but I don't think there's really much to learn from that.
The legends on this are really charming, especially the "cap" on the capslock key. It's cute to see this stuff here when it would have been really easy for brainworks or whoever had these produced could have just used a funny font and called it a day.
And here we have the switches, Alps KFNR, which are a low profile buckling rubber sleeve over membrane design that appears to have only the 2 flavors, white standard sized switches and yellow compact. They feel about how you would expect from a cheap low profile sleeve board, if you've used laptops from this time period you've probably used something about on par with these if not just these switches. The stabilizers are really well designed though and it's really easy to take stabilized keys on and off, with a small about of lube they would be easy to silence too. Don't waste your time though, at least on this board they have issues returning quickly and as a result words with repeated letters aren't typed correctly, book becomes bok and really become realy, very frustrating. I'm not sure if that's an issue with this board being weird or if that's common for these sorts of switches, I don't have enough information to go off of.
But that's not why you would get one of these and you know it. You get these because they're funny or nostalgic. They're built super sturdily too, clearly meant to survive repeated interactions with a child. If you want build quality it's hard to beat this, it kicks the shit out of the M and the M doesn't even have carrying handles and was never available in slime green. Unironically this is my favorite keyboard, it's the jewel of my collection.
Some of the stuff inside the box that wasn't a keyboard:
Spoiler:
So here she is removed from the case as much as I can get it. This appears to be a laptop keyboard module that's been glued into the case and as such I can't disassemble further. If I had another one of these laying around I might try to use heat to loosen the glue and get it apart that way but I don't think there's really much to learn from that.
The legends on this are really charming, especially the "cap" on the capslock key. It's cute to see this stuff here when it would have been really easy for brainworks or whoever had these produced could have just used a funny font and called it a day.
And here we have the switches, Alps KFNR, which are a low profile buckling rubber sleeve over membrane design that appears to have only the 2 flavors, white standard sized switches and yellow compact. They feel about how you would expect from a cheap low profile sleeve board, if you've used laptops from this time period you've probably used something about on par with these if not just these switches. The stabilizers are really well designed though and it's really easy to take stabilized keys on and off, with a small about of lube they would be easy to silence too. Don't waste your time though, at least on this board they have issues returning quickly and as a result words with repeated letters aren't typed correctly, book becomes bok and really become realy, very frustrating. I'm not sure if that's an issue with this board being weird or if that's common for these sorts of switches, I don't have enough information to go off of.
But that's not why you would get one of these and you know it. You get these because they're funny or nostalgic. They're built super sturdily too, clearly meant to survive repeated interactions with a child. If you want build quality it's hard to beat this, it kicks the shit out of the M and the M doesn't even have carrying handles and was never available in slime green. Unironically this is my favorite keyboard, it's the jewel of my collection.
