ALPSaver [SM-FKB401] [SKCC Cream]

[zrrion]

I have finally managed to snag an ALPSaver of my very own!


This one was hooked up to an electron microscope which is honestly super cool. (Here's one in with the scope)

It has a pretty unique layout that I personally love to pieces. and this one in particular has some cool additional legends that appear to be printed on, although someone with incredibly steady hands could have painted them on I guess. I'm not really sure how to determine the printing method here, if anyone has any ideas let me know.


The relegendables on this are very cool but I honestly don't know how to remove the tops. I am hesitant to try prying them off as I do not wish to damage them.




I haven't looked into any of the model numbers or anything so I don't know how old the board even is. I want to clean it up and get it working over USB at some point. It would be nice to retrobrite the caps but I don't want to do anything that would risk marring the printed legends so they'll have to stay tan. The seller was nice enough to link me to the user manual for the electron microscope that it goes with and I will be sure to share whatever info about the board I can find in there. A pipe dream is to convert this and then hook it up to a modern JEOL electron microscope, which would be the coolest.

Here's a link to an album with more images.

[//gainsborough]

This is a thing of beauty! Glad it got snagged up by someone in the community! Those greek letter sublegends are super cool!

[Chyros]

That's really cool, congrats on the find!

[Slom]

Great board you got there

I believe the extra legends are engraved and infilled. On my board the pi symbol got a little nick and you can definitely see that the white color has some depth underneath it.

On the degree symbol you can also see that the level of the white color is lower than the level of the normal key cap texture.

DSC02418 (2).JPG (309.1 KiB) Viewed 3051 times

[zrrion]

So I used this board at work for something like 2 weeks to really get used to the thing. I adjusted the layout a bit to make it a bit more user friendly (for this user anyway) and I really like typing on it. I feel like I am typing quickly on it and it sounds very nice. The all metal chassis makes it very pingy, and the thick caps add a thocky sound to the bottom out. I made a foam insert that would go between the plate and the PCB if it still had a PCB. The foam helps to reduce the higher pitch that the metal case would let echo around in it. This doesn't remove the ping, which is still very present, but it does deepen the sound and shortens the sustain. I really like how it sounds this way.
As for actually using the board, I find that the bottom row keys are a little too tall and too sharply angled for my tastes, and SKCC cream is a bit to heavy for me. I think I would really like something in weighting between cream and green. These two factors resulted in my hands getting tired after all day typing on this thing. The layout is perfectly workable and I did not run into any problems with it at all. I thought I would have trouble with the stagger but I ended up getting used to it and typing at my regular speed rather quickly, even managing to do my bastard touch-typing with no trouble after a while.

Verdict: A great board with a few very minor problems that would prevent it from being practical for everyone, but is still a very usable board.


I made some legends to match the badge.

A little closer look at the hand drawn legends. I feel like they add a bit of charm to the board.

This is my first time creating a cable and it went rather well all things considered. The donor cable came from a G80 POS with a touchpad. There's enough wire in it for 2 PS/2 cables which contributes to the considerable heft of the cable. I am glad the cable has such a large ferrite bead as this prevents it from knocking around in the large opening in the case. The mounting bracket is also very convenient.

The while thing weighs about 5lb 11oz, which is roughly 2.6 kg. This board has the best weight to key ratio of any of the boards that I own by a decent margin.

[zrrion]

For anyone interested, here's a typing test of the board: https://freesound.org/people/zrrion_the ... ds/469013/

[//gainsborough]

brilliant