Build knowledge.
Three articles, no fluff.

Your first build, start to finish.

You ordered the parts, the box landed, and you're staring at a hot-swap PCB asking yourself if this was the right call. It was. Building your first board takes about 90 minutes, the tools below run $86 total, and it's almost impossible to break anything if you go slow.

Step 1 · Lay it all out

Open the box on a clean, flat surface — ideally a magnetic mat. Identify the case, the plate, the PCB, your switches, your stabilizers, and the keycaps. Lay them in the order you'll install them. If anything is missing, email us at hello@yourbusiness.com before you do anything else.

Step 2 · Mount the stabilizers

Stabilizers go on the PCB before switches. They snap into the wide-key slots: spacebar, shift, enter, backspace. We pre-lube ours, but you should still wiggle them gently to confirm zero rattle. Bad stabs ruin a build before you've even started.

Step 3 · Press the switches in

Hot-swap PCBs accept any 3-pin or 5-pin MX switch. Align the LED hole at the top, two metal legs at the bottom, and press straight down with your thumb. You should feel a positive click. Bent legs straighten with tweezers — never force a switch.

1. Start with the corners — Esc, F12, the Ctrl keys.
2. Work inward in a spiral pattern.
3. Check the back of the PCB after every row — no bent legs poking through.
4. Test every switch with the included tester before you cap them.

Step 4 · Cap and ship

Keycaps push straight on. Use the wire keycap puller to remove or reposition. Plug the USB-C cable in, fire up VIA or QMK, and start typing. You're a builder.

Lubing switches without ruining them.

Hand-lubing is the single best upgrade you can make to a stock switch. It smooths linear glide, deepens tactile bumps, and turns scratchy housings into the deep buttery sound everyone is chasing. It also takes about 90 minutes for 70 switches and the tools cost $52.

Pick your lube

Two lubes cover 95% of cases:

• Krytox 205g0 — viscous, best on linear switches. Smooths the glide and adds depth without slowing the spring.
• Tribosys 3204 — thinner, best on tactiles. Reduces scratch without flattening the bump.

Open the switch

Use a 4-prong switch opener or carefully pry the top housing off with a flathead. The stem and spring will fall out — that's expected. Lay the four parts in a tray with the stem oriented bump-up.

The brush technique

1. Dip a #00 brush in lube — get just enough to coat the bristle tips, not soak them.
2. Paint two thin strokes on each rail of the bottom housing.
3. Roll the spring through the lube on a piece of plastic — never paint a spring directly.
4. Dab the four corners of the stem slider.
5. Reassemble. The whole switch should glide smoother on the first press.

Test as you go

Lube three switches. Pop them in your board. If they feel right, keep going. If they're too thick, you're using too much — wipe and try again with half. Save yourself 67 redo cycles.

Tune a stabilizer in five minutes.

A rattly spacebar will ruin every other thing you got right. Stabilizer tuning is the single highest-impact 5-minute job in keyboard building, and most beginners never even attempt it.

Symptoms of a bad stab

• Metallic ping when you slap the spacebar.
• A wobbly shift key that rocks left-right.
• Backspace that sounds different from every other key.
• Generally cheap-feeling action on the wider keys.

Three fixes, in order

Try them in this sequence — most boards only need the first one.

1. Clip the feet · the molded plastic feet on the stem catch the PCB. A pair of nail clippers removes them in 30 seconds. Result: cleaner bottom-out.
2. Grease the wire · dab dielectric grease on the bent ends of the wire where it sits in the housing. Result: zero metal-on-plastic ping.
3. Holee mod · a thin strip of bandaid sticky-side-down inside each stem socket. Adds dampening, removes any remaining tick. Five minutes, free.

Final test

Type the same paragraph you used for switch sound testing. The wide keys should now sound identical to a single-key press — same depth, same volume, same character. If anything stands out, it's the stab.