Fitting and Tuning Stabilizers
How to assemble, lube, clip and fit screw-in stabilizers, and why this twenty minute job does more for a board than anything else.
If you do one thing to a new keyboard, do this. A rattling spacebar is the most audible fault a board can have, it is present on almost every prebuilt, and tuning it takes about twenty minutes.
What a stabilizer is and why the wide keys need one is covered in stabilizers. This is the fitting.
The parts
A screw-in stabilizer comes as five things:
- Two housings, the plastic bodies that sit in the PCB.
- Two stems, the moving parts the keycap clips onto.
- A wire, bent into a long U, linking the two stems so they move together.
- Screws and washers, which fasten the housings through the board.
You need one stabilizer per wide key. A standard 60 percent board needs four: spacebar, backspace, enter, left shift. A tenkeyless or full-size needs more, plus a second size for the number pad.
What you need
- A small Phillips screwdriver
- Dielectric grease, or Krytox 205g0
- A small brush, and a cocktail stick or similar for the wire
- Flush cutters, if you are clipping the stems
- Patience for about twenty minutes
Step 1: clip the stems, optionally
Turn a stem over. On most stabilizers there are two small feet on the underside that serve no purpose in a mounted stabilizer and hold the stem slightly off the PCB, which is what produces the hollow click on the downstroke.
Cutting them off flush is called clipping, and it is the single biggest improvement here. Use flush cutters, take them off level with the surrounding plastic, and do not cut into the body.
This is irreversible, and it is what almost everyone does. If you would rather not, skip it: lubing alone still helps.
Step 2: lube the wire ends
This is where the rattle comes from, so this matters more than the rest.
The wire’s two ends sit in small pockets inside the stems, and the wire’s bends rest in the housings. Metal moving in plastic is what you can hear.
Put a generous amount of grease on:
- The two ends of the wire, the last few millimeters that insert into the stems.
- The two bends where the wire sits in the housings.
Generous is correct here, unlike switches. A stabilizer wants noticeably more grease than a switch stem does, and too little is the usual reason a tuned stabilizer still rattles.
Step 3: lube the housings and stems
A thin coat inside each housing where the stem slides, and on the outside of each stem where it contacts the housing. This is the same idea as a switch: it removes the scratchiness of the travel rather than the rattle.
Keep grease off the top of the stem where the keycap clips on. A greasy clip is a keycap that works loose.
Step 4: assemble
Push the wire ends into the stems, then push each stem into its housing. The wire should sit in the housing’s channel, and both stems should move together when you press either one.
Press each one a few times. It should feel smooth and make almost no noise. If you hear a click or a rattle now, it will be louder with a keycap on, so fix it here: more grease on the wire ends, and check the wire is seated in both channels.
Step 5: fit to the board
Push the housings through the PCB’s stabilizer holes from the top, then fit the washers and screws underneath and tighten.
Two things to watch. Do not overtighten, because the screw threads into plastic and will strip. And check the stabilizer sits flat, since a housing not fully seated holds the keycap at an angle.
If your board is plate-mount rather than screw-in, the housings clip into the plate instead and there are no screws. Everything before this step is identical.
Step 6: test before the keycaps
Press each stabilizer stem with a finger, then press it off-centre, near one end. An untuned stabilizer is obvious off-centre: it ticks or feels uneven.
Then fit the keycaps and test again by pressing each wide key at both ends and in the middle. A spacebar should sound and feel the same wherever you hit it. If one end is louder, that stem needs more grease on its wire end.
The band-aid mod
If a stabilizer still sounds hollow after all of this, the housing is bottoming out against the PCB. A small square of a thin adhesive plaster on the board under each housing gives it something soft to land on.
It works, it is fiddly, and it is worth trying only after lubing and clipping have not been enough. Most boards do not need it.
What good looks like
Quiet, even, and boring. A properly tuned spacebar makes a slightly deeper version of the sound your letters make, with no tick, no rattle and no difference between the ends.
It is the least glamorous job in a build and it has the highest ratio of result to effort. If you want to lube the switches too, that is lubing your switches, and it takes ten times as long.