Blog → Rebuilding the Monsgeek M1

Monsgeek M1, which I wrote about last year, didn’t serve for long – about six months later, I replaced it with the wireless NuPhy Halo75 V2, wanting to cut the number of wires on my desk to a minimum. I took the switches out of the M1 – the excellent Kailh Jellyfish Clicky, put stronger springs in them and moved them to the NuPhy.

About the Halo75 V2, for now I’ll only say that it has served me well for a whole year without a single complaint. As for the Monsgeek M1, back then it went to the shelf partially vandalized, and only recently it was fully rebuilt.

The revival started with full disassembly and cleaning. The M1 consists of 8 layers, including the PCB, and this sandwich is held together by 20 screws: 6 attach the top frame to the bottom part, another 6 connect the PCB to the mounting plate. The remaining 8 go to the 4 stabilizers. These are screws of three different types, so it’s impossible to mix them up.

The order of components in the assembled keyboard, from bottom to top:

• Metal base
• Dielectric sheet
• Bottom PCB sound dampening
• The PCB itself
• Switch pad
• Top PCB sound dampening
• Mounting plate (positions the switches)
• Metal frame

The stabilizers are mounted on top of the switch pad. Their hooks go into the elongated holes, and the threaded sleeve goes into the round ones. After a light click that locks the threaded sleeve, a screw is tightened into it from the back side of the PCB.

Before fixing the stabilizers, the pad should be flattened as much as possible, even if it goes in waves. The waves will disappear when the next layer presses the pad.

The USB port is located in the metal base of the case and connects to the PCB with a 5-pin JST 1.0 connector.

There are also two metal inserts on the sides (during the first assembly, I replaced them with clear acrylic), and the mounting plate has silicone gaskets that hold it between the base and the frame. The encoder knob can be installed at any stage. That’s actually all there is to say about the M1 design.

Switches

During the rebuild, the keyboard got an improved version of the Kailh Box Jellyfish switches – the Pro Bixia. The manufacturer has a press release that lists a good ten improvements of this model, but first of all, you notice an even louder and sharper click on press. It also seemed to me that the housing quality got better – all 82 switches went in with the same force and without any centering problems.

It won’t be an exaggeration to say that at the moment, these are the best mass-market clicky switches.

Keycaps

As a rule, I prefer keycaps without any legends – they look cleaner and are easier to swap. But one look at the XVX Jelly R2 Smoke was enough to make an exception right away.

XVX is first of all a team with excellent skills in molding and pressing. While many manufacturers are limited by existing production technologies, XVX create both technologies and materials themselves, and sometimes come up with truly amazing things. And most importantly – while trendy brands like Keychron or the same NuPhy keep pumping out “solid” keycaps that don’t let the light through (which makes the keyboard backlight pointless), XVX, on the contrary, actively work with light and try to reveal its beauty.

The Jelly R2 Smoke has a two-layer structure: a dark, only partly translucent base with a shagreen texture is covered with a crystal-clear layer that looks like pure ice. Both layers are made of polycarbonate. The promo photos looked suspiciously like renders, but it turned out that in real life, the keycaps look simply stunning. There is no point in telling more – this has to be shown.

This text was written on the rebuilt Monsgeek M1 – with the new components, it turned out so comfortable that even after a year-long break, I didn’t need to get used to it again. The experiment can be considered a success.