In America, there are a few rare things you seem to find easily in Korea.  Good comics, for one. :)  But seriously, we have terrible choices of Blue Cherry boards.

It comes down to:

G80-3000LSCRC-2.  USD 65 (70,000 won).  A nice basic board, except it has Chinese character components on it.
Filco Majestouch (various).  $120 (130,000 won) or more, for a basic 104.  NKRO doesn't mean much on USB.
Ione Scorpius M10.  USD60 or so delivered (65,000 won), but famous for bad quality.  I want keyboards which last more than three months!

So I asked for a G80 for a present.  They're back-ordered and you only get them intermittently, even when you order one.  I wanted it for December, but it arrived in the first week of January, when we were told it would arrive at the end.

I usually type on a Unicomp board, so I'm most familiar with their dye-sub lettering.  I found the Cherry lasered keys rough and annoying, plus the Chinese lettering didn't appeal to me (I'd have liked Hangul, but to me Chinese is most associated with people getting tattoos of mis-spelled characters :) :) )

I realized I had no choice but to get another set of keys.

At first, I figured I'd get one of those brown "MX SPOS" boards which showed on Geekhack.  Nice board, apparently, but the original supply at $22dried up, and it was going to be more money to take one from another member.

So my next choice was a G80-8113HRBUS-2.  Used, but at $28 or about 30,000 won, you're getting double-shot keys for the price of the lasered MX-SPOS, and a touchpad. 

The seller sat on my order for several days, and it finally came, wrapped in bubble wrap and half a Kansas City newspaper.  It was missing one plastic cover over a re-labelable Home key.  It was labelled as an asset of Nextel, a now-defunct US mobile carrier.  Dirty too.

The '8113 is everything which bothers me about Cherry:

1)  The layout is fundamentally bad.  Why does everyone sacrifice the edit area on a over-104-key?  All the "terminal" 122s are bad too.

2)  The model number has to be decoded to be understood.

3)  Even when decoded, it has no relation to the real equipment.  Two or three of us got '8113s, two mostly brown, but mine all with Clears (well, some sort of linear switch that's clear or white) and a gray spacebar.  It's a terrible typing feel in comparison with Blues.  Despite the US layout code, it has a tall Enter.

What I did find good about the Cherry boards are the ease of disassembly.  You can remove keys by hand, with only minor injury.  In contrast, ALPS require a blowtorch and saw to remove. :)  It took like 20 minutes to strip the '8113.

I gave the keys a bath in Oxi-Clean (one of those powdered soaps which foams when water is added) and a bit of shaking.  Although it was pretty dirty, to where a few keys had the letters obscured, it came up nicely without a ton of work.  It works really well for cleaning most keys, in fact.

I chose to leave a few keys behind:  The editng block (the replacement keys were not contoured), windows keys (I like the round dome keys on the new board), Enter and |\ (not the right size) and the small capslock (I prefer a gap to avoid striking it by accident)

Final Tally:

From original board:  15
Clear-top, pad-printed from new board: 15
Double-Shots: 73
Pad-Printed from New Board: 1 (Menu)

When I re-assembled the 3000, it had two keys which didn't register accurately until I mashed them many, many times (rated 50 million cycles?  Now down to 5 million :) )  Is it a typical problem with Cherry switches?

The double-shots almost shine next to the lasered keys -- the lasered fill is a cream color instead of true white.

Now, what do I do with the 8113?  I don't like the layout, and since I tried to take it apart, the touchpad seems erratic.  I wonder if it's got any value as a parts board?  I just stuck all the removed caps from the 3000 on it.

Anyone got 120 Blue switches they aren't using? :) :) :)
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