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Designer: Pwner
Fulfilment: ZealPC
Total shipped price: 435 USD
Reason for condemnation: unsellable
It's been more than 4 years now since the group buy, so I'm hazy on the details, but at the time, the Xeno seemed super advanced. I was about a year into the hobby and lots of things about it appealed to me. Brass was all the rage at the time, so I was entirely suckered in by the shiny pvd rose gold parts, and I was trying to figure out my favorite plates, so having a half plate as an option was enticing. This paired with what seemed like a crazy delivery time of 3 or 4 months made it a real no-brainer, especially because I finally had disposable income at my first job out of college.
Fulfilment ended up being controversial. They handedly missed the original deadline, which I expected, but communication from Zeal ended winding down to a trickle. I don't think I was all that worried about getting scammed because Zeal was running it and they had a preexisting store on the line, but it was pretty annoying.
When it delivered after about a year (not that bad by group buy standards), I saw some weirdness about it and just put it away for another year because I didn't want to deal with it right away. Also it coincided with me getting a bunch of other keyboards in from my initial buying spree. At this time, I had moved away from brass plates and already had a general sense of what half plates feel like.
And so it went to sleep before I fled NYC for a suburb to weather out the initial wave of Covid.
At the time of review, all of this background meant that I wasn't really impressed with it to begin with, but when I tore it all down as a part of the usual evaluation process, I found some really sus aspects that I wouldn't have expected from such an expensive keyboard.
Rust-colored residue, unusable screw threads, weird grease, chips, dings, dents, imprecise machining all took me by surprise when shooting the video.
After having shown all this, and the video getting relatively high view numbers, I knew I couldn't really sell this without being so obviously personally identified. When I sell, I do it with a different account with no references to the channel, and also like to document as many flaws as possible.
This usually just means I get shafted for being too honest, but that's what I'd want too, so that's that. The rusty stuff mostly but not completely washed off, but the bigger problem was the daughterboard screw threads not really working properly. This didn't seem worth it to fix and then disclose, so I deemed this keyboard unsellable and condemned it to a life of storage at my parents' house.
When I brought it over, my brother thought it was kind of neat so we built it up with Durock Light Tactiles and GMK Handarbeit where it sits as his programming/typing keyboard, and my temporary keyboard when I'm home for the holidays. So it's not as bad of a fate as a lot of the other keyboards sitting here, but still a shame falling into a normie's hands while having so much potential.
While using it, one of the biggest problems is that it disconnects with even imperceptible amounts of static shock. I think there may be a way to resolve this with a little mod to the daughterboard so if I can work up enough ligma for it, maybe I'll fix it.
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