Renata Fitch

Four to eight hours is completely normal for a first build. The videos are people who have done thirty of them, with the parts already sorted, editing out the boring parts.

Where your time actually went, roughly: switch soldering is 136 joints and at a genuinely careful pace that is an hour and a half. Stabilisers, if you tuned them, is another hour on a first attempt. Testing and inspecting is where beginners spend the rest, and that is time well spent.

An order that saves an hour next time. Test the PCB with tweezers before soldering anything. Do the stabilisers completely, and test them by hand, before any switch goes in, because reaching a stab under installed switches is miserable. Put in the four corner switches, snap the plate on, check it is square, then solder those four, then the rest. Flash the firmware before you install every keycap.

Second build will be two hours. Third will be ninety minutes and you will stop counting.

Did the tape, recorded before and after. Higher pitched, slightly poppier, hollowness untouched. Which is exactly what you said would happen.

Can confirm from doing exactly this. Look for a relay with browned board underneath it and a slight burnt smell. Desolder, replace with the same rating from any electronics supplier, and the fault goes away. Took me an hour and about four dollars including postage.

Rattle that survives lubing is nearly always slop, not friction, and one sided rattle narrows it a lot.

Check in this order. Is the right hand stab housing fully clipped into the PCB and the screw actually tight. A stab that is 90 percent seated on one side produces exactly this, a silent left and a rattly right. Second, are the stem feet clipped. Unclipped feet let the stem rock in the housing and no amount of grease stops that. Third, the wire. Lay it on a flat surface and look along it; if it rocks at all it is not flat, and the end that sits proud is the end that rattles.

The holee mod is what fixes wire slop properly: a small piece of thin fabric or bandage material wedged into the stem insert where the wire sits, so there is no free play at all. It is fiddly for ten minutes and it is the difference between quiet and silent.

For next time: hotswap sockets are held on by solder pads about the size of a grain of rice and they hate lateral force. Always check the pins are dead straight against something flat, always press straight down, and always support the back of the PCB with your other hand or lay it on a hard surface. Five pin switches with the plastic legs need to line up perfectly or they lever the socket sideways as they go in.

Good chance you can see it under a phone camera zoomed in. A lifted socket sits a fraction of a millimetre proud and the solder fillet looks cracked and grey rather than shiny.

Before you bin the next one, open it and put a multimeter on the cells. A pack that dies after four screws is almost always one cell group that has dropped out of balance, not five bad ones. If you see four groups at 3.6 volts and one at 2.1, that is the whole fault.

Rebuilding with new cells is doable but you need a spot welder, or a friend with one. Soldering directly to cell tops cooks them and it is genuinely a fire risk, so do not be tempted. If you are not set up for it, at least you will know whether the pack was salvageable before you spend on a new one.