Disassembly

Given the hot-swappable nature of the switches and this being my first time with the J.Zao White Wings switches, it only made sense to take one of these apart. This is a linear switch with a pre-lubed stem and spring, and well lubed to where I don't expect to gain much from taking these apart for cleaning and re-lubing. There is also a translucent insert added into the top housing to help more evenly diffuse light from LEDs underneath the switch and I noticed very smooth travel of the stem with minimal wobble. Functionally the switch design is quite similar to other such Cherry MX-style switches in that the stem pushes the copper contacts in the bottom housing together to initiate switch actuation that is then read by the microcontroller on the keyboard.


Disassembly of the keyboard is not hard given the combination of a metal chassis and gasket mount usually means the keyboard is held together via screws alone. Since this uses a two-piece case design, removing the top panel means also first pulling off the volume wheel knob cover. Then use the provided screwdriver or one of your own to take out the eight gold Torx T6 screws on the back.


At this point, the three main sections of the keyboard can be loosed enough to wholly remove the top piece as well as have enough room to access the three separate cables connecting the PCB to the bottom case panel that hosts daughter boards. One of these is to help ground the metal case, another goes from the relatively large 6000 mAh battery to help power the keyboard in the two wireless modes, and the third goes from the I/O daughter board that has the Type-C port and the two control switches. We also see the James Donkey R2 has both a piece of custom-shaped foam between the PCB and the bottom panel as well as a tape mod to help dampen keystrokes and eliminate any reverberations.


At this point you can choose to remove all keycaps and switches to further separate the plate from the primary PCB itself, and this would allow you to also potentially replace and re-lube the stabilizers too. We also see clear use of a gasket mount here with James Donkey having gone for medium density foam on either side of the PCB at the edges which then sit in place in notches machined out of the top and bottom aluminium panels to effectively sandwich the plate/PCB piece at various points all around—this is one of the better implementations for a pre-built keyboard, especially compared to what we saw with the softer foam and the plastic case on the RS2 that resulted in a less-than-satisfactory decoupling of your keystrokes. You can also remove these foam pieces and go with either of the two optional silicone gasket sets included in the box for a stiffer experience—some may well prefer it, but the stock experience was plenty fine for me. The PCB itself is the usual black in color and uses high quality Gateron hot-swap switch sockets. Powering the keyboard are various hardware controllers including the YiChip YC3121-L dual 32-bit RISC architecture USB microcontroller and Bluetooth 5.0 transceiver, and there are a few other harder-to-identify drivers here that might well be for LED control in addition to hosting a 2.4 GHz SoC. All the components, including the switch sockets, SMD 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.