tag · brand

#mode

8 articles tagged #mode.

Every #mode piece

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 75 with a block mount, and Oil Kings are a heavy factory-lubed linear — together they hit a register worth coming back to.

thockMay 7, 20265 min read

Near-monochrome top-down line silhouette of a 75% keyboard case with a single warm-bronze accent dot at the bottom right standing in for the new R2 accent-weight finish.

News

Mode Sonnet R2 opened at CannonKeys

Mode's second round of its 75% Sonnet board ran at CannonKeys from 2026-06-01 through 2026-07-15 after a vendor-side timeline shift. See the in-article update for the dates and accent-weight color options; the closed entry is archived at /group-buys/past.

thockMay 6, 20265 min read

Side-section line drawing of a keyboard case with the plate resting on cantilevered metal tabs reaching in from the case walls, drawn in a 2px warm-grey stroke on warm paper; the right-hand tab is deflected downward under a keypress, with a single muted-terracotta splash at the flex point where the tab bends and a small warm-bronze dot in the upper margin.

Deep Dives

Leaf-spring mounts, explained: what a bending metal tab does that a foam strip cannot

The Nyawice's spec line and Mode's plate-tab mounting blocks both lean on one old idea — let a thin tab bend instead of a foam strip squash. The physics is textbook; the keyboard implementations are not, and the name covers more than one mechanism.

thockAug 4, 202610 min read

Exploded cross-section of a keyboard case showing a brass weight plate seated in the case bottom beneath the PCB, with a callout comparing its mass to the empty aluminum cavity it replaces

Ideas

The brass weight mod: what added mass actually buys you

Bolting a half-pound of brass into the bottom of a case is one of the more expensive mods in the hobby for how little it visibly does. It changes how a board sounds and sits on a desk — just not in the ways the marketing copy implies.

thockJul 6, 20268 min read

Trends

Reading the Trends Tracker

thock's Trends Tracker is a weekly snapshot of what is rising, falling, or holding flat across the hobby — switches, keycaps, layouts, vendors, and brands, scored on a single -100 to 100 scale and updated each Monday. This is what the columns mean and what they do not.

thockMay 8, 20265 min read

Centered vendor hub — a plum-filled keyboard-shaped node with an inner diamond mark — in the upper-mid canvas, with five arrows fanning out beneath it to a low arc of five product-variant board silhouettes (each a small rounded-rect keyboard outline with faint key-dot rows and tiny config-tag lines beneath); a single plum sparkline rises left-to-right along the bottom of the canvas, peaking at the right edge with a focal dot.

Trends

When customs became vendor-first

From 2018 through 2022 the typical custom shipped through one host vendor and a fan of regional proxies; by 2026 the baseline custom is a configurator on a vendor's own storefront. Boards moved. Keycap group buys mostly didn't.

thockMay 4, 20266 min read

Trends

How 75 percent became the default custom layout

Two years ago a custom-board recommendation defaulted to 65% with a polite note about 75% as the next step up. The KBD75 v3's staying power as a default recommendation, the QK75, and a crowded mid-tier have flipped that order. 75% is now the layout customs reach for first.

thockApr 24, 20265 min read

Cross-section silhouette of a keyboard showing a floating plate held by four gasket pads, with a fine amber accent line tracing the separation between plate and case top.

Ideas

What gasket mount actually delivers (and what it doesn't)

The label appears on keyboards at every price point, from $90 prebuilts to $350 group-buy customs, but two boards with identical spec-sheet language can sound nothing alike. Here is what the term actually tells you, and what it doesn't.

thockApr 19, 20269 min read

loading · tag