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Why do I Diamond Polish and Keep Switches Mated?

Diamond paste is so effective at making switches smooth that results can be noticed after only a few thousand actuations, whereas breaking-in may require more than one million actuations to even start removing scratch. Overall, using a paste provides more consistent and much smoother results than broken in switches.

Additionally, to produce the smoothest switches, the housing and stem are kept together during the cleaning process. This is important because surfaces begin with different levels of microscopic imperfections. During the Actuation period, the stem leg and leaf will “flatten” at a uniform rate with one-another, becoming a mated surface.

Keeping parts paired up adds more complexity to the cleaning process and does take more time than if parts were mixed, however, I think the effort is worth it and leads to better and more consistent switches.

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Above is the setup I use to keep all the parts organised. Switch Tops, Stems and Bottom Housing can easily be paired back together during assembly using these tools.

Since 1.5mm Acrylic is commonly only found in Clear colour, I had to engraved text to each Bottom-Housing holder. This makes it obvious and easy to match bottoms with the stems in the 3mm acrylic.

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Why It’s Important to Keep Switch Parts Mated

Lets say that 1x Switch in a batch is a dud and not polished properly, it can end up ruining the quality of 2x Switches.

i.e. 1x Bad Switch = Bad Stem + Bad Housing

Now if we mix the switch parts with another switch:

• 1x Bad Switch = Bad Stem + Bad Housing
• 1x Good Switch = Good Stem + Good Housing

We end up with 2x Bad Switches:

• 1x Bad Switch = Good Stem + Bad Housing
• 1x Bad Switch = Bad Stem + Good Housing

Therefore: 1x Bad Switch x 1x Good Switch = 2x Bad Switches

If we keep switches mated instead of mixing parts, we avoid this scenario and can simply just remove the 1x Bad Switch instead of mixing it into the batch and now needing to remove 2x Bad Switches.

This becomes a greater problem with scale since we don’t know how many parts are bad until tested.

i.e. If for whatever reason 10/100 switches are bad, mixing the parts has the potential to produce 20/100 Bad Switches.

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More Images

216 Switches - 6 Sets of 36 switches opened up and ready for cleaning