Every unlubed switch makes three sounds you did not ask for: scratch from the stem dragging along dry rails, spring ping from the coil ringing like a tiny tuning fork, and assorted housing tick. Lubing replaces plastic-on-plastic sliding with plastic-on-grease and coats the spring so it cannot ring. The payoff is audible on the first key: smoother travel, a slightly lower pitch, a shorter bright tail, and that dense "creamy" quality the community prizes. Cherry's own history proves the point: classic MX switches were famously scratchy for decades, and the 2023 MX2A revision's headline change was adding factory lube and a revised spring.
The three lubes that matter
You need at most three products. Krytox 205g0 is the thick grease standard for linears: stem rails, stem sides, housing rails. Tribosys 3203 or 3204 are thinner films for tactiles: enough to kill scratch while preserving the tactile bump, which thick 205g0 would smother. Krytox 105 is a thin oil for springs, applied with the gloriously lazy bag-lube method: springs in a bag, few drops, shake. That one step alone cures the metallic ring covered in our spring ping guide. Tools are minimal: a switch opener, a small flat brush, tweezers or a stem holder, and patience measured in podcast episodes.
Step by step
- Open each switch. Desolder or pull the switches from a hot-swap board, then crack each one open with a switch opener. Keep stems, springs, top housings and bottom housings in separate trays so a fan or a sleeve does not end your evening.
- Lube the springs. Drop all the springs in a small plastic bag, add a few drops of thin oil such as Krytox 105, seal it and shake for about thirty seconds. This bag-lube method coats every coil evenly and is the single step that eliminates spring ping.
- Lube the bottom housing. With a small brush, paint a thin film on the inner rails where the stem slides and lightly around the spring seat. Thin means barely visible: if you can see white clumps, you have applied too much. Avoid the metal leaf entirely, on every switch type, because lube on the contacts causes registration problems.
- Lube the stem. Hold the stem with tweezers or a stem holder and brush the sliding sides and rails. For linears, Krytox 205g0 everywhere except the legs is standard. For tactiles, use thinner Tribosys 3203 or 3204 and skip the legs entirely, or you will erase the bump you bought the switch for. For clickies, do not lube the stem at all: the click jacket on a Cherry MX Blue and the click bar in a Kailh BOX clicky are the click mechanism, and grease on either mutes or kills it. Bag-lube the spring and leave the rest dry.
- Reassemble, film if desired, and test. Set the spring, seat the stem, and snap the top housing on, adding a switch film between housings if yours are wobbly. Mount a few finished switches and type: the scratch and ping should be gone. Then accept that you have 80 more to go.
The mistakes that actually matter
Overlubing is mistake number one, and it is why "thin coat" appears in every step above: too much 205g0 makes a linear feel mushy and slow, and on a tactile it can flatten the bump into nothing. Mistake two is lubing tactile legs; the legs are what create the bump against the leaf, and grease there erases the switch's whole personality. If you own big-bump switches like the Holy Panda or Boba U4T, be conservative: Gazzew ships Bobas unlubed by design because they are already smooth, and many owners leave the stem legs completely dry. Mistake three is lubing the leaf or contacts, which can cause registration problems on any switch type, linears included. Mistake four is the one you cannot undo: lubing a clicky. The click jacket on a Cherry MX Blue and the click bar in a Kailh BOX Jade are the click mechanism itself, so grease on either deadens or removes the click, and the only way back is a new set of parts. On clickies, bag-lube the springs and stop there. When in doubt, less lube and another pass later beats stripping 90 switches to clean them.
Do you even need to lube?
Increasingly, no. Factory lubing has become genuinely good: the Gateron Oil King ships deep and oiled out of the box, Gateron's G Pro line and the Akko V3 Pro series arrive pre-lubed at budget prices, and TTC lubes essentially everything. Hand-lubing still wins for switches that are legendary-but-scratchy stock, with the NK Cream as the poster child: rough out of the box, sublime after lube and break-in. Browse the switch library and check the factory lube row on any spec table before committing a weekend. And since pulling switches is step zero, a hot-swap board turns this project from a soldering job into a pleasant evening.