 Corsair Gaming RGB keyboards feature precision Cherry MX RGB keyswitches for 16.8 million color-per-key backlighting for virtually unlimited customization. Click now to learn more. So I don't know what was funnier about the Cherry factory tour, the fact that we showed up in Lederhosen or the fact that they had preemptively arranged for two of the women in their marketing department to show up in... Derndl. In Derndl. I think it was, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, but Derndl. Absolutely fantastic, so they were really good sports about the whole thing. I'm sure it was harder to walk around their workplace dressed like that than it was for us as strangers to... People would recognize them and they're walking around in heels and Derndl. At the office. And then they're with these two random dudes who have very low quality, in some cases ripping all over the place, Lederhosen. Oh man. My boxers were totally showing by the end of the day. So the first step in the completely unexpected, everything about these just felt over engineered, that we got to see the acoustic chamber that they use in order to validate not only the loudness of products, but also the sound signature of products. Which was insane. And just to make sure that it's super accurate, they have this very targeted microphone inside and foot and a half-ish thick padding on the outside with this double door system that he had to climb into. Well, I looked at it and I went, well, the microphone's next to the switch. In this case, it was an MX RGB blue switch. And I was like, well, okay, but how do you actually press the button while having the door closed? So not being a German engineer, he assumed that you climb inside and press it manually yourself every single time. Turns out that wasn't the answer. They actually have a mechanical finger that presses the switch over and over again for validation. But hey, whatever. My solution would have worked too. Technically, yes. So it's not just for validating that as they make running changes and improvements to Cherry MX, that the sound signature stays the same, but they do use it for that. It's also for certifying keyboards to be low noise enough to qualify for... Blue angel certification, which is like a German government thing where if you want to sell something to the German government, it has to pass the blue angel certification. So if the question was, who cares if you have a 20 decibel noise floor acoustic chamber for keyboards, the answer is someone. The next stop in the tour was probably my favorite part, the environmental chamber. So they have this whole hallway of machines that essentially torture test keyboards from... Really torture test. They had a new product in one of them that was going through a cycle of temperature and humidity changes just to validate that in storage, it wouldn't be broken by any of aforementioned temperatures and conditions. So these things are capable of going anywhere from minus 40 all the way up to plus 180 degrees. So why would that ever matter? Apparently, sea freight is a big deal because if your cargo container is at the top of the ship and it's under the sun for a very long time, that inner area within the metal is going to get really hot. These are things you don't think of and then the chambers can also handle anywhere from 10% relative humidity all the way up to 98% relative humidity. So of course, they loaded one up at minus 25 degrees through one of the testers that they use to validate their 50 million keystroke cycles. Which doesn't just kind of tap it, it hammers pretty hard. Hammers pretty hard and then they cranked up the humidity in it so we could get this awesome footage of one of their testers running on, what switches were they? Were they MX blacks? I think so. I think they were MX blacks of just this thing being hammered at in the frost, in the cold. Absolutely insane. The craziest machine in my opinion was the temperature shock machine. So it goes from, I believe it was 70 degrees, the test that they were running, it could be more drastic than this, but the test that they were running at the point in time was 70 degrees Celsius in the chamber up top and then there would be an elevator that took five seconds which would bring it down into a separate chamber down below which was negative 20 degrees. And it had to be able to not like crack and shit. Yeah, not have the solder just fail. Just completely give up. Which is pretty intense actually. So in the next room we found the most expensive piece of equipment on this entire trip that I almost broke. It has a joystick and he went a little bit arcade machine on it, but it was okay. I was driving that thing. So if you've ever seen like a really big warehouse and you see that crane that's on the big rail at the top that can move pretty much wherever it wants. Basically like that. It's pretty much what it was. But much faster when you really go on it. When you reef on the joystick, yeah. So it's just an actuation point, but you can program on the computer how you want it to move so you can check out different batches of switches compared against each other. So they'd go through the environmental testing that we'd seen earlier or it would be say something that had just been pressed 50 million times versus something that hadn't or anything that you want to compare. And you test a batch of switches and the idea is that you'd look at the exact force required to press it down and then pull it back up. And then you'd also be looking at where the actuation point was for the switch. And the idea is that you'd want to see as much consistency as possible within a batch and then as much consistency as possible after 50 million keystrokes. So after 50 million keystrokes it should have either not gotten that much worse or gotten better. And the funny thing about Cherry is that their whole, well, our key switches are validated for 50 million thing is based on this. Whereas I don't think we really have any assurance of what up to, let's say for example, 60 million keystrokes means. Does that mean it performs the same or better or it still actually functions at all? And Cherry actually has testing up to 100 million. They just wouldn't show us those numbers. They would not show us those numbers at all. I'm guessing they're not quite as perfect anymore at that point. Probably not. So the switch we saw on the last piece had a clear housing. So we can tell it's an MX RGB. So that's from the Corsair's Corsair Gaming RGB line of keyboards. But one of the coolest things about the RGB keyboards is actually that the way the LEDs are embedded in the PCB instead of in the housing for the key switch makes them less prone to failure due to ESD. But of course there are other electrostatic discharge concerns as well. So this was a pretty cool piece of scientific equipment. What does this thing do? 8,000 volts. Over 8,000 volts! So many volts. So he would charge up a metal plate that was on the table and then make sure, very confidently, make sure that there was no electrostatic charge going from the table up through the keyboard. So he was just typing on it. And the keyboard has to operate aside from not zapping the person who's using it. Operate flawlessly. So he's using the keyboard while charging the metal table with 8,000 volts. And then he would take the 8,000 volt conductor and put it right on the keyboard and have to be able to continue using the keyboard with no faults, no glove or anything, just using the keyboard. Well, okay, they did say that even though it's quite painful... It's not gonna... you're not gonna be serious. Very low amperage, very low current. It's not gonna really hurt anybody. Although I asked, actually I don't know if you were there for this. I was there. And I asked him, do you ever like sneak up behind anyone and give them the 8,000 volts? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So Cherry takes keyboards very seriously, but they can still have some fun. Yeah, apparently. So we got to see Cherry's first mechanical keyboard, which was made with M8 switches. You what, Nate? Anyways, it was designed so that when making a newspaper, instead of individually placing each one of the letters onto this giant grid so they could mass print newspapers... You just typed it up. You could type it in, which was revolutionary. On the most bizarro land keyboard ever with all the... Some of the weirdest keys. All the go switches. Go that way, go this way, go possibly both ways. Go the other way. I don't know. And apparently spacebar stabilizers... Spacebar stabilizers didn't really seem to be a thing. I don't know if those maybe were in there at the beginning and then were taken out, but they were definitely not a thing when I was trying it. It was really heavy too. Yeah, super heavy. There was a whole metal construction around the whole thing. So with the original keyboard out of the way, we asked very, very nicely if we would be allowed into the Cherry MX production area. And they were very kind about saying no. Yeah, they wanted to protect their trade secrets. All the improvements that they've made to Cherry MX key switches over the years that have been not quite copied correctly by anyone who might be trying to copy the design. They didn't want anyone to look at that. Yeah, anyway, so we were able to make a compromise of being able to check out the actual keyboard manufacturing. So first we got geared up. This was my first time wearing an ESD lab coat and electrostatic sandals. Yeah. So you take this little electrostatic strap and put it under your shoe and then into your sock or in Linus' case under here. I prefer to call them electrostatic sandals, but sure, whatever. Whatever you want to call it. And then this was really cool. Now Cherry was telling us this production line is actually 20 years old. So this is far from the state of the art that we might find in some of the top secret areas. So it starts with the crazy robot arm. And I mean, I was blown away when he told me this line is 20 years old and is like nothing to do with the advancedness of some of the other more top secret lines because this arm like picks up the keyboards top half, bottom half, puts them on the line and then it all scooches to the right, to the right, to the right. Oh no. Anyways, these ones, it didn't require individual key cap placement. So we didn't get to see some of the stations running. Yeah. He said it was a lot cooler earlier in the day, but this was like a special order for the German government. So all the key caps were sort of preassembled. So it skipped a lot of the stations. But what's cool is that the stations automatically know if a step doesn't need to be done. Automation. And they just don't do it. Yep. So we went through and then the next stage actually that we did get to see was it testing all of the switches. So this giant machine that was pre-aligned for every single one of the key caps would go down and press every single button just to make sure it worked. And I didn't quite believe it when Cherry told us at first that every single product was a hundred percent tested because I kind of went really. That's too much man. But they are. And we even saw a keyboard fail. Yeah. Yeah. We got to see one fail. So the next station, which was the laser engraving station. That was so cool. That which was super cool. That was like the coolest thing ever. Like two individual lasers going insanely fast, although apparently slow because apparently it's a 10 year old laser engraver and it's much slower than all their other ones, but seemed really fast to me would go through and engrave all the key caps unless it failed. So when we saw that one going through production fail, it skipped the laser engraving station. There was a big red light that went off. Very serious business. Someone ran over and pulled it off the line, inspected it manually. Notice that apparently the machine told them the space bar failed. So they found that it was the stabilizing wire below the space bar, which was actually not aligned properly. So he aligned it properly manually, put it back at the beginning of the assembly process and it went through all the testing again. When it passed, then it got laser engraved and then it went to packaging. Very cool. I mean, I think the thing that stood out most to me about the entire Cherry tour was the obsessive attention to detail and quality. Testing, validation, secondary validation. For something that I just completely took for granted until I saw what goes into... The amount of science, the amount of everything that goes into these little tiny switches. So I guess that's pretty much it. Huge thanks to Cherry for letting us really take a look under the kimono, so to speak, of their manufacturing process. Thanks to you guys for watching. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. Leave a comment letting us know. Would you like to see more of this kind of behind the scenes factory and product validation coverage from us? Please let us know because otherwise we don't know what you want to see. Guys, check out the video description for a link to buy a cool t-shirt like the ones I normally wear. You can also give us a monthly contribution or change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code whenever you buy keyboards or whatever else it is you buy. Thanks again for watching and as always, don't forget to subscribe. Thanks a lot.