Disassembly

Given the hot-swappable nature of the switches, it only made sense that I take one of the Kailh BOX Black switches apart. This is a 3-pin mechanical switch employing the Cherry MX stem design, albeit Kailh has heavily modified it to add the BOX design I've covered in more detail here. I quite like the BOX switch concept, albeit it does show more of a benefit for tactile and/or clicky switches given the decoupled feedback mechanism. With the BOX Black linear switch, things are simple in that the stem/slider pushes the green active block into the box that in turn presses the metal contacts together for actuation.


Disassembly of the keyboard itself is on the easier side of average given the metal frame employed. You need to take off several specific keycaps, as seen above, to gain access to 13 Phillips-head screws holding the keyboard together. Now you can lift off the frame/PCB piece enough to dislodge the two internal cables from the bottom case panel. The first of these comes from the battery itself, whose battery capacity is hard to identify here, and the second heads out from a daughter PCB that has the Type-C connector we saw before. Endorfy has several smaller pieces of tape on the primary PCB that also cover screws you can remove to fully separate the frame—which is also the keyboard plate here—from the PCB itself if you wish to further modify the keyboard or lube the stabilizers yourself. There is no foam sheet anywhere to help dampen keystrokes though!


The primary PCB is black in color and uses hot-swap switch sockets that come branded QMS or OMS—not something I am familiar with right away. Powering the wired mode is an HFD USB microcontroller whose details are hard to find online except to note it's been used mostly with less expensive keyboards, and the wireless operation is taken care of by a HunterSun HS6600 series combo 2.4 GHz and Bluetooth 5.0 SoC. All the components, including the switches, SMD RGB LEDs, and capacitors, are soldered to a multi-layered PCB.

Before we move on, be advised that disassembly may void the warranty and that TechPowerUp is not liable for any damages incurred if you decide to go ahead and do so anyway.