Pairing Oil Kings with the Mode Sonnet
This pairing has been on the bench for months, and a free Sunday finally made it happen. The Sonnet is a soft 65 with a top-mount-leaf gasket, and Oil Kings are a heavy factory-lubed linear — together they hit a register worth coming back to.
The Sonnet has been sitting in a stack of unbuilt boards since the second batch shipped, and the Oil Kings have been in a parts bin since they were pulled out of an Endgame84 last winter. Both have been waiting for the other. Mode Sonnet is the kind of board that punishes a bright switch — the polycarb plate option and the leaf gasket give it a softness that wants something with weight behind it. The Gateron Oil King is exactly that switch.
Why this pairing
The Sonnet's mount is the interesting part. It's a top-mount with silicone leaves between the plate tabs and the case lip — Mode calls it a leaf-spring mount in their docs, and the deflection on it is genuinely noticeable when you press into a corner of the plate. That's wonderful for typing feel and a small problem for sound: a soft mount with a light switch tends to read as hollow, like the board is doing too much of the work.
Oil Kings fix that. They're a 55g bottom-out linear with a long-pole stem and what feels like an aggressive factory lube job — Gateron uses a thicker grease than most builders would apply by hand, and the result is a switch that arrives at the bottom of its travel with a defined low-mid thock instead of a crack. Pair that landing with a plate that gives a millimeter under your finger, and the whole stack stops fighting itself. The plate absorbs the sharpness; the switch supplies the weight. It's the same trick that made Linear Dreams in a Bauer 2.0 work three years ago, only the Sonnet does it with less effort.
The other reason this pairing works is keycap clearance. Oil Kings have a slightly taller-than-MX housing, and the Sonnet's plate sits flush enough that there was a real question about interference with deeper-profile caps. No issue — Cherry-profile clears comfortably, and there's room above the switch shoulders to add tape later for anyone wanting to play with that mod.
Sound check, post-build
It's deeper than expected, and that's saying something for a board the bench went into expecting depth. The bottom-out is a clean low thock with almost no reverb — the polycarb plate flexes enough to take the bite off the impact, and the Oil King's grease soaks up whatever's left. The top-out is the surprise: there's a small, defined click-back from the stem returning that didn't show up in previous Oil King builds. Probably the leaf mount letting more of that travel back out. It's not unpleasant, just present.
Stabs sound clean. The spacebar is the deepest key on the board by a noticeable margin — closer to a drum than a thock, which is either a feature or a problem depending on whose video you're modeling your taste after. We like it. Modifiers are tight and consistent, no rattle on the right shift even at typing speed.
Compared to the same switches in a Bakeneko65 built last summer, the Sonnet sounds about a half-octave lower and considerably less metallic. Compared to a Geon Frog with Oil Kings — which is the obvious comparison — the Sonnet is softer in feel and slightly muddier in sound. The Frog is more articulate; the Sonnet is more comfortable. We're typing this article on the Sonnet and not switching back.
What we'd change
Two small things. First, the FR4 plate is worth trying. The polycarb is doing a lot of work to soften the Oil King's impact, and there's likely a version of this build where a stiffer plate brings back some articulation without losing the depth — especially for anyone using a lighter switch alongside this same board.
Second, the Striker keycaps are great but ABS-shiny under three weeks of use will start to grate by July. A set of KAT Milkshake is on the way for a different build, and there's a temptation to redirect them here just to see what a taller, thicker-walled profile does to the sound signature. We'll report back if that swap happens.
The Sonnet group buy is closed, but Mode runs them on rotation — keep an eye on the Mode Designs Sonnet page if you want to be alerted on the next round. Oil Kings are stocked basically everywhere now. There's no reason not to try this combination if you have access to both.
Build sheet
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