the Stabilizer Problem
Stabilizers have long been the great unsolved problem in the world of keyboards. Their function is straightforward; they prevent longer keys (such as the spacebar) from seesawing upward at one end when the opposite end is pressed down. Current solutions serve that purpose well enough, but the issue is: they all sound awful. Taeha Kim's face in response to the rattle of an unmodified traditional stabilizer—in a video it amuses me to note has been viewed millions of times—sums up how all of us keyboard nerds feel.
For decades this has been the core absurdity of luxury typing: you can buy a $4,000 hyper-engineered super-premium board with exotic materials, rare hybrid switches, hidden fasteners, leaf springs, and custom gaskets interfacing every surface. Yet among its most critical components can be found a fundamentally flawed mechanism that has seen little refinement since its inception.
Hobbyist modders thus spend long hours hand-lubricating and tuning their stabilizers to eliminate rattle, painstakingly brushing high-viscosity grease into the interstices between parts.
