Center bar arrow direction is confusing

After spending a few days with the center bar half stuck and half protruding from the bottom of the board, I happened to read this in the Day 795 Kickstarter report: “We printed arrows on the rails on the bottom of the keyboard to help show which direction to slide the keyboard into the center bars.” Oookay; I was able to pull out the bar and easily slide it in the right way. It seems to me that a more natural way to view the operation is to slide the bar into the keyboard and that would suggest that the arrows should point in the other direction.

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This is my fault.

And I’m going to blame baby-related lack of sleep. If you hold the center bar steady and slide the keyboard, the arrows make sense, at least to me.

What you’re saying makes sense to, say, at least 60% of the population.

We did update the manual for MP1 to try to be clearer about this and also called it out in the shipping notification emails.

For MP2 or MP3 (depending on whether the MP2 parts got made before or after the tooling got fixed), we’ve removed the arrows from the “bottom” (near your palms) set of rails AND added a bumper to them to make it impossible to slide the center bars on the wrong way.

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Having tried to slide the bar on several times and getting it well and truly stuck I found a squirt of PTFE lubricant made all the difference.

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good to know. I have had a couple tense moments when I have gotten them stuck.

Not trying to insult anyone or add fuel to the confusion fire… I saw the arrows and ignored them, I looked at the center bar and the M01 halves and thought about how I think they should go on… it took a few minutes to figure out which way and that I’d have to connect the halves together first.

Not everyone thinks the same (thank goodness for that). Some of us are more mechanically inclined than others, some are great at coding and others not so much. Maybe we could leave the arrows, and Jennigma and myself could just take some photos and do a write up? Yes, sorry Jenn, I volunteered us. Then again, MP2 or MP3 addresses this issue so it may be a moot point.

I would like to encourage anyone out there that aren’t sure or doesn’t get it to try it first (not force things) but try it, if it doesn’t work, ask the community for help. You’d be surprised what you’re capable of if you just try. Obviously, you did… good job.

I initially put them on what seemed like the correct way based on the arrows, and after that got the bar stuck badly enough I needed to tap it with a tack hammer to free it, I analyzed the slider and the slides and got it on correctly. I still find it fiddly, but am pretty much only using the keyboard split now, so I am blissfully unaffected.

As you perhaps intended to imply above, most people will have tried it and either failed or succeeded before they would find docs. :slight_smile:

I think Jesse’s “Arrows of Ambiguity” post was the right approach.