Lubing Your Switches
The actual process, step by step: what you need, how to open a switch, where the lubricant goes, and how long it really takes.
This is the process. Which lubricant to buy and why is covered in switch lubes; read that first if you have not already, because the wrong grease applied perfectly is still the wrong grease.
Set your expectations before you start: a full board is two to four hours for a first attempt. It is not difficult, it is repetitive, and the repetitiveness is the whole difficulty.
What you need
- Lubricant. 205g0 for linears and silents, 3204 or 3203 for tactiles. One pot does several boards.
- A switch opener. A small block that pops the housing apart. Around 10 dollars and worth every penny: the alternative is two flathead screwdrivers and a much higher chance of breaking clips.
- A small paintbrush. Size 0 or smaller. Cheap art brushes are fine. Trim it shorter than it comes if the bristles are floppy.
- A switch puller, if the board is already built and hot-swap.
- Somewhere to put things. A tray with compartments, or just four small dishes. You will have four piles of parts, roughly 70 of each.
- Optional: tweezers, for handling springs without dropping them repeatedly.
Before you commit
Do ten switches, put them in the board, and type on them next to the unlubed ones. Ten switches is fifteen minutes and it tells you three things: whether you like the result, whether you are using too much, and whether you actually want to do the remaining sixty.
This step is skipped by almost everyone and it is the single most useful thing on this page.
Step 1: open the switch
Put the switch in the opener and press down. The top housing separates from the bottom, and the clips are on the sides.
If the top does not come away cleanly, do not force it at an angle. The clips are the part that breaks, and a switch with a broken clip will not stay closed.
Inside you have four things: the top housing, the stem, the spring, and the bottom housing with the metal leaf in it. Sort them into your dishes as you go rather than at the end, or you will spend twenty minutes separating a pile.
Step 2: the stem
This is where the feel comes from, so this is where care matters.
Hold the stem by the cross on top. Apply a thin coat to the two rails on the sides, which are the flat surfaces that slide against the housing. Then the underside of the cross, lightly.
The rule is a film, not a layer. If you can see grease sitting on the plastic, it is too much. Load the brush, then wipe most of it off on the edge of the pot, then apply.
On a tactile switch, stay off the legs. The two legs on the side of the stem are what generate the bump against the metal leaf, and grease on them softens or removes it. You can lube the face above the legs; do not lube the legs themselves.
Step 3: the spring
Two approaches.
Bag lubing, which is fast: put all the springs in a small zip bag, add a few drops of a thin oil such as Krytox 105, seal it, and shake for a minute. Tip them out on a cloth. Five minutes for a whole board, and slightly messy.
By hand, which is slower and more controlled: a very small amount on each end of the spring, where it meets the bottom housing pole and the underside of the stem. This is where spring ping comes from, so the ends are the part that matters.
Either is fine. If you are already using a grease rather than an oil, do this by hand, because shaking a bag of springs in thick grease produces springs glued together.
Step 4: the bottom housing
A thin coat on the two vertical rails the stem slides down, and on the central pole the spring sits on.
Nothing on the metal leaf. Grease on the contact surfaces means a key that registers intermittently, which is worse than any amount of scratchiness, and the fix is opening that switch again to clean it. If the brush touches the leaf, wipe it before you reassemble.
Some people also lube the inside of the top housing. It makes a small difference to the upstroke sound and adds meaningful time. Skip it on a first board.
Step 5: reassemble
Spring on the pole. Stem on the spring, cross upward, oriented the way it came out. Top housing on, and press until both clips click.
Press the stem a few times before you move on. It should feel smooth and return crisply. If it feels slow or sticky, you used too much: open it, wipe the stem, reassemble.
Then repeat, about seventy times
A rhythm helps more than speed. Open ten, lube ten stems, lube ten housings, reassemble ten. Batching by step is noticeably faster than finishing each switch individually, because you are not putting down and picking up the brush every time.
Put something on in the background. This is the part of the hobby that is genuinely just labour.
What goes wrong
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Switch feels slow or mushy | Too much lubricant | Open, wipe the stem and rails, reassemble |
| One key registers intermittently | Lubricant on the metal leaf | Open, clean the contacts with a dry brush |
| Tactile bump is gone or faint | Lubricant on the stem legs | Open, wipe the legs clean |
| Housing will not stay closed | Broken clip from forcing it open | Replace that switch |
| Faint metallic ring on the return | Spring not lubed | Lube the spring ends |
| Result sounds duller than expected | Working as intended | Use a thinner grease next time, or less |
Every one of these is recoverable. None of them damages anything permanently except the broken clip, and switches are sold in packs partly for that reason.
The honest version
If your switches already ship factory lubed and feel fine, the improvement here is real but small, and four hours is a lot to spend on it.
If you have twenty minutes rather than four hours, lube the stabilizers instead. A rattling spacebar is more audible than seventy slightly scratchy switches, and it is the fastest improvement available to a new build.