Switch Lubes
Which lubricant to use on switches, stabilizers and springs, what the viscosity numbers mean, and what lubing does and does not fix.
Lubing switches is the most effective thing you can do to a keyboard for the least money, and the most tedious. A pot of grease costs about 15 dollars and does several boards. Applying it to a full set of switches takes two to four hours, one switch at a time, and no amount of practice makes it quick.
This page is about which lubricant to buy and why. The process is covered separately in lubing your switches.
What lubing actually changes
Three things, in descending order of how much you will notice.
Friction. Every press slides a plastic stem against a plastic housing on two rails, and compresses a steel spring that rubs where it sits. Unlubricated, you can feel that as a faint scratchiness, and on cheaper switches as an obvious one. Lubricant removes it. This is the change people describe as making a switch feel expensive, and it is the main reason to bother.
Sound. Lubricant damps the impacts at each end of the travel and deadens the surfaces the sound reflects off inside the housing. The result is deeper and more muted, and less sharp. Whether that is an improvement depends entirely on what you were after: if you bought long-pole switches for a crisp bottom-out, heavy lubing on the housing will undo exactly what you paid for.
Consistency. This is the underrated one. Factory lube, where it exists, is often a blob dropped in one spot, so some switches in a batch are smooth and others are not, and the unevenness is more irritating than uniform scratchiness because it is what you notice. Brushing every switch by hand makes all of them the same, even if none of them ends up dramatically better.
What lubing does not fix: a spring weight you dislike, a tactile bump you find too sharp or too vague, or a rattling stabilizer. Those need a different spring, a different switch, and stabilizer work respectively.
Oil, grease, and why the difference matters
All three words describe lubricants. What separates them is viscosity, which is resistance to flowing.
Oils are the thinnest and always liquid. They spread on their own, reach into places a brush cannot, and stay put much less well. Their use here is springs.
Greases are the thickest, semi-solid until something moves through them. They stay exactly where you put them, which is what you want on a sliding surface, and they damp heavily. Their use is switch housings, stems and stabilizers.
The practical consequence is that too thin a lubricant on a stem does very little and migrates away, and too thick a lubricant anywhere makes the switch feel slow and sluggish rather than smooth. Sluggishness is the classic beginner mistake, and it comes from applying a stabilizer-grade grease to switch stems, or applying the right grease far too thickly.
One thing that is not optional: lubricant must not touch the metal leaf. Grease on the contact surfaces can stop the circuit closing reliably, and the result is a key that works intermittently, which is much worse than a scratchy key and means opening the switch again.
The four you will actually see
The hobby has standardized on a small number of products, almost all Krytox or TriboSys. The numbers are viscosity grades, not quality grades.
| Product | Viscosity | Use it on | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Krytox 205g0 | High | Housings, stems, springs, stabilizers | The default. Maximum smoothness and a deeper, more muted sound. Softens a tactile bump slightly. |
| TriboSys 3204 | Medium high | Housings, stems, springs | Smooth without muting as much. The usual choice if you want the switch to stay lively. |
| TriboSys 3203 | Medium | Housings, stems | Thinner again. Takes the friction off while leaving tactility and sound largely intact. |
| Krytox GPL 105 | Low (an oil) | Springs | Stops spring ping. Does very little on a stem, and will not stay there. |
Read that as one axis, not four products: thicker means smoother, quieter and more muted; thinner means less smooth, louder and more defined. Everything else is a matter of where you want to sit on it.
Choosing by what you have
Linear switches. 205g0, and enough of it. There is no tactile event to preserve and nothing to lose by going as smooth as possible. This is the combination that produces the sound most people are chasing.
Tactile switches. 3204 or 3203. 205g0 will smooth a tactile beautifully and also round off the bump, which is the thing you bought the switch for. If the bump matters to you, use the thinner grease, and keep it off the legs of the stem where the bump is generated.
Silent switches. 205g0 is fine. The damping pads have already removed the crispness, so there is nothing left for a thick grease to blunt.
Clicky switches. Do not lube the click mechanism. You can lube the rails and the spring, but grease on a click jacket or click bar deadens the click, which is the entire switch.
Springs. 105 if you are doing them separately, or 205g0 if you are doing them in the same pass as everything else. Spring ping is a faint metallic ringing on the return, most audible on an otherwise quiet board, and the fix is trivial: a very small amount of lubricant on the ends of the spring where it contacts the housing and the stem.
Stabilizers. 205g0, or a dedicated thick dielectric grease. Stabilizers want much more lubricant than switches do, and badly tuned stabilizers ruin a board more reliably than unlubed switches. If you only have time for one job, do the stabilizers.
How much, and the mistakes
A thin, even film on the two rails of the stem and on the inside of the housing where the stem slides. Not a coating, not a visible layer of grease, and nothing pooling anywhere. A single pot of 205g0 will do several full boards, which tells you how little each switch needs.
The three ways it goes wrong:
- Too much. The switch feels slow and damp rather than smooth. Unfixable without opening every switch and wiping it out, so err light: you can always add more.
- On the leaf. Intermittent keys. Open, clean the contacts, reassemble.
- On a tactile’s legs, or a clicky’s click mechanism. You removed the feature you were paying for.
None of these are dangerous and all of them are recoverable, which is worth saying because the amount of debate around this suggests otherwise. It is grease on plastic. If you dislike the result, you can take it apart again.
Whether it is worth it at all
Honestly: it depends on your switches and your patience.
If your switches ship dry and feel scratchy, hand lubing is transformative, and it is the single best return on effort in the hobby. If your switches are already factory lubed and feel fine, the gain is real but much smaller, and two to four hours is a lot to spend on it for a first board.
A reasonable middle path is to lube the stabilizers, which takes twenty minutes and makes an obvious difference, and leave the switches until you have lived with the board and know what you want to change about it. You can always do the switches later, and on a hot-swap board you can do them ten at a time while still using the keyboard.
You can see which switches in the index state that they ship factory lubed, which is a reasonable place to start if you would rather not do this at all. Note that where a maker says nothing about lubricant the field is blank rather than set to no, so a blank is not evidence that a switch ships dry.