Wasted 3 weekends filing stabilizers before a guy at the Chicago meetup told me to just clip them

Sam Anderson · 2026-10-15T20:00:08.096107+00:00

So I built my first few boards over the winter and I kept running into this mushy spacebar and rattle on the shift keys. I thought the fix was more lube and more filing, so I sat there with a needle file for like 4 hours on a Saturday trying to get these cheap plate mount stabs perfectly flat. My girlfriend walked by and asked why I was sanding plastic at 1am and I told her I was "tuning the feel." Then last month I drove up to a small meetup in Chicago and this older guy picked up my board, pressed the spacebar twice, and just said "dude you didn't clip the legs." I had no clue what he meant. He showed me on his own build, you just snip off those little plastic tabs with flush cutters so the stab sits flat on the PCB and the wire doesn't bind. Took me 90 seconds on the drive home to do it on my spare set. Have any of you had a dumb moment like this where the fix was way simpler than the thing you were grinding away at?

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Wasted 3 weekends filing stabilizers before a guy at the Chicago meetup told me to just clip them | Custom Keyboard Builders - Topic Shares