I ordered my Model F keyboard from modelfkeyboards.com on the 10th of September. Unfortunately, the next day I realised that my previous choice of keyboard was missing the F keys, which are somewhat important to my workflow. I received a very prompt response from the store owner, who agreed to change my order to a similar keyboard with the F keys (Ultra Compact FSSK Model F). My order arrived on the 30th of October - I consider myself rather lucky, as I have placed an order around the time a new batch was being shipped. Some of the reviews that I read online suggested that the wait could be significantly longer. I am also glad that it was shipped in such a way that the delivery driver could not just leave the somewhat expensive package anywhere for porch pirates to snatch (if I recall correctly, it required a code).

Actually putting the keyboard together was much simpler than anticipated. Despite having little to no manual skills, I didn’t feel particularly overwhelmed and it did not require a whole lot of fancy tools to assemble. The most difficult step of the assembly actually involved inserting in the keycaps: it took me about 2-3 hours to insert all the keycaps such that the capacitive buckling spring switches were not constantly activated due to bad flipper/spring position and didn’t sound like there was something wrong going on. The keys don’t feel particularly heavy: in fact, my subjective opinion is that they’re lighter than the blue switches of my previous keyboard.

The keyboard arrived without pre-installed firmware: I had to flash it myself. It was not a big problem, albeit unintuitive (the installation instructions and the software required was a little weird).

Finally, some of the bad things: I believe that there is a problem with the firmware that causes keys to actuate in weird order, if pressed in very quick succession the keys f and a (regardless of the order they’re pressed in) will usually result in the firmware thinking that the key a always being pressed first. It is ungodly annoying and I have to look into fixing it, but for now I am out of clues. Further, I believe that my keyboard has a dead key due to a manufacturing defect with the spring and/or the flipper of the Page Down key. After two hours of trying to fix this key specifically, I was not able to make it actuate upon key press (it either doesn’t actuate at all or actuates at all times). The force required is much higher than for other keys and the sound gives me the impression that the spring simply does not buckle. Both of the issues are extremely infuriating and I hope that I can fix them soon. On the other hand, someone could say that this gives me the proper experience of using a keyboard (model) from 1981 :).