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Corsair gaming RGB keyboards feature Precision Cherry MX RGB key switches for

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16.8 million color per key backlighting for virtually unlimited customization

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click now to learn more

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so I don't know what was funnier about the Cherry factory tour the fact that we

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showed up in letter hosen or the fact that they had preemptively arranged for

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two of their of the of the women in their marketing department to show up in

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um durndle in derle I think it was probably pronouncing that wrong but

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durndle absolutely fantastic so they were they were really good sports about

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the whole thing I'm sure it was harder to walk around their workplace dressed

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like that than it was for us as strangers to people would recognize them

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and they're walking around in like heels and D yeah at the office and then and

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then they're with these two random dudes who have like very low quality in some

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cases ripping all over the place later hosen oh oh man yeah my boxers were

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totally showing oh definitely by the end of the day so the first step in the

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completely unexpected like I mean everything about these just felt over

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engineered but we got to see the acoustic chamber that they use in order

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to validate not only the the loudness of

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products but also the sound signature of

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products which was insane and just to make sure that it's super accurate they

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have this this very targeted microphone inside and foot and a halfish uh thick

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padding on the outside with this double door system that he had to climb into

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well I looked at it and I went well the microphone's next to the switch in this

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case it was a it was an mxr GB blue switch and I was like well okay but how

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do you actually press the button while having the door closed so not being a

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German engineer he assumed that you climb inside and press it manually

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yourself every single time turns out that wasn't the answer they actually

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have a mechanical finger that presses the switch over and over again for uh

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for for validation but hey whatever my

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solution would too technically yes so it's not just for validating that as

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they make running changes and improvements to cherrymx that the sound

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signature stays the same but they do use it for that it's also for certifying

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keyboards to be low noise enough to to qualify for um Blue Angel certification

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which is like a German government thing where if you want to sell something to

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the German government it has to pass the Blue Angel certification so if the

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question was who cares if you have a 20 D noise floor acoustic chamber for

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keyboards the answer is

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someone the next stop in the tour was probably my my favorite part the

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environmental Chambers so they have this whole hallway of machines that

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essentially torture test keyboards from really torture test they they had a new

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product in one of them that was going through a cycle of temperature and

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humidity changes just to validate that in storage it wouldn't be broken by any

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of aforementioned temperatures and and conditions and so

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these things are capable of going anywhere from minus 40 all the way up to

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uh plus 180° so why would that ever matter uh

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apparently SE Freight is a big deal because if your if your cargo container

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is at the top of the ship and it's under the sun for a very long time that that

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inner area within the metal is going to get really hot kinds of things you don't

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think of and then the uh the chambers can also handle anywhere from 10%

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relative humidity all the way up to 98% relative humidity so of course they uh

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they they loaded one up at -25° through one of their one of the

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testers that they use to validate their 50 million keystroke Cycles which

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doesn't just kind of tap it it hammers pretty hard hammers pretty hard and then

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they cranked up the humidity in it so we could get this awesome footage of one of

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their testers running on uh what switches were they were they MX blacks I

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think so I think they were MX blacks of just this thing being hammered at in the

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frost in the cold absolutely insane the

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craziest machine in my opinion was the temperature shock machine so it goes

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from I believe it was 70° the test that they were running it could be more

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drastic than this but the test that they were running at the point in time was 70° C in the chamber up top and then

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there would be an elevator that took 5 Seconds which would bring it down into a

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separate chamber down below which was -20° and it had to be able to not like

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crack and not have the solder just yeah fail just completely give up which is

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pretty intense actually so in the Next Room we found the most expensive piece

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of equipment on this entire trip that I almost broke it has a joystick and he

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went a little bit arcade machine on it but it was

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okay I was driving that thing so if you've ever seen like a really big

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warehouse and you see that crane that's on the big rail at the top that can move

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pretty much wherever it wants basically like that it's pretty much what it was

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much faster when you when you really go on when you Reef on the joystick yeah so

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it's it's just an actuation point but you can program on the computer how you

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want it to move so you can check out different batches of switches compared

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against each other so they'd go through the Environmental Testing that we' seen

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earlier or it would be say something that had just been pressed 50 million

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times versus something that hadn't or anything that you want to compare and

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you test a batch of switches and the idea is that you'd look at the exact

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Force required to press it down and then pull it back up and then you'd also be

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looking at where the actuation point was for the switch and the idea is that

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you'd want to see as much consistency as possible within a batch and then as much

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consistency as possible after 50 million

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keystrokes so after 50 million keystrokes it should have either not

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gotten that much worse or gotten better

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and the funny thing about Cherry is that their whole well our key switches are

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validated for 50 million thing is based on this whereas I don't think we really

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have any Assurance of what up to let's

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say for example 60 million keystrokes means right does that mean it performs

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the same or better or it still actually functions at all and Cherry actually has

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testing up to 100 million they just wouldn't show us those numbers would not

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show us those numbers I'm guessing they're not quite as perfect anymore at that point probably not so the switch we

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saw on the last piece had a clear housing so we can tell it's an MX RGB so

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that's from the uh Corsair's Corsair gaming RGB line of keyboards but one of

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the coolest thing about the RGB keyboards is actually that the way the

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LEDs are embedded in the PCB instead of

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in the housing for the key switch makes them less prone to failure due to ESD

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but of course there are other electrostatic discharge concerns as well

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so this was a pretty cool piece of scientific equipment what's this thing

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do 8,000 8,000 volts over 8,000 volts so

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many volts so he would he would charge up a metal plate that was on the the

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table and then make sure very confidently make sure that there was no

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electrostatic charge going from the table up through the keyboard so he was

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just typing on it and the keyboard has to operate aside from not zapping the

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person who's using it operate flawlessly so he's using the keyboard while

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charging the table the metal table with 8,000 volts and then he would take the

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uh 8,000 volt conductor and put it right on the keyboard and have to be able to

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continue using the keyboard with no faults no glove or anything just using

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the keyboard well okay they did say that even though it's quite painful it's not

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going to you're not going to be serious very low amperage very low current it's

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not going to really hurt anybody although I asked actually I don't know if you were there for this I was there

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yeah I asked him do you ever like sneak up behind anyone and give them the 8,000

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oh yeah oh yeah so Cherry takes keyboards very

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seriously but they can still have some fun yeah apparently so we got to see

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Cherry's first mechanical keyboard which was made with M8 switches you what mate

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a anyways it it was designed so that

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when making a newspaper instead of individually placing each one of the

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letters onto this giant grid so they could Mass print newspaper you just

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typed it up you could type it in reolution Bizarro land keyboard ever

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with the weirdest Keys all the go switches go that way go this way go

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possibly both ways I and apparently space bar stabilizers space bar

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stabilizers didn't really seem to be a thing thing I don't know if those maybe were in there at the beginning and then

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were taken out but they were definitely not a thing when I was trying it that

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was it was really heavy too yeah super heavy full metal construction around the

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whole thing so with the with the original keyboard out of the way we

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asked very very nicely if we would be allowed into the Cherry MX production

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area and they were very kind about saying no yeah they uh they they wanted

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to protect their Trade Secrets you know all the improvements that they've made

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to Cherry MX key switches over the over the years that have been not quite

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copied correctly by anyone who might be trying to copy the design they didn't

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want anyone to look at that so uh yeah yeah anyway so we were able to

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make a compromise of being able to check out the actual keyboard manufacturing so

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first we got geared up this is my first time wearing an ESD lab coat and

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electrostatic sandals yeah so you you take this little

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electrostatic strap and put it under your under your shoe and then into your

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sock or in L's case under your prer to call them electrostatic sandals but sure

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whatever whatever you want to call it and then this was really cool now Cherry

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was telling us this production line is actually 20 years old so this is far

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from the state-of-the-art that we might find in some of the top secret Areas so

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it starts with the crazy robot ARM and I mean I was blown away when he told me

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this line is 20 years old yeah and is like nothing to do with the advanced of

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some of the other more top secret lines cuz this ARM like picks up the keyboard

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top half bottom half puts them on the line and then it all scooches to the

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right to the right to the right oh no

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anyways these ones it didn't it didn't require individual keycap placement so

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we didn't get to see some of the stations running yeah he said it was a lot cooler earlier in the day but these

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this is like a special order for the German government so all the key caps

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were sort of pre-assembled um so it skipped a lot of the stations but what's

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cool is that the stations automatically know if a step doesn't need to be done

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Automation and they just don't do it yep so it it went through and the the next

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stage actually that we did get to see was it testing all of the switches so

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this giant machine that that was pre-aligned for every single one of the

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key caps would go down and press every single button just to make sure it

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worked and I didn't quite believe it when Cherry told us at first that every

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single product was 100% tested cuz I kind of went really that's too much man

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but they are and we even saw a keyboard fail yeah yeah we got to see one fail so

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the next station which was the laser engraving station that was so cool that

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which was super cool that was like the coolest thing ever like two individual lasers going

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insanely fast although apparently slow because apparently it's a 10-year-old

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laser engraver and is much slower than all their other ones but seemed really

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fast to me uh would go through and engrave all the key caps unless it

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failed so when we saw that one going through production fail it skipped the

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the laser engraving station there was a big red light that went off very serious

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business someone ran over and pulled it off the line inspected did it manually

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noticed that apparently the machine told them the space bar failed so they found

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that it was the stabilizing wire uh

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below the space bar which was actually not aligned properly so he aligned it

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properly manually put it back at the beginning of the assembly process and it

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went through all the testing again when it passed then it got laser engraved and

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then it went to packaging very cool I mean I think the thing that stood out

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most to me about the entire Cherry tour

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was the obsessive attention to detail

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and quality testing validation secondary

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validation for something that I just completely took for granted until I saw

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what goes into the amount of science the amount of everything that goes into

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these little tiny switches so uh I guess I guess that's pretty much it I huge

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thanks to Cherry for letting us really take a look under the kimono so to speak

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of their manufacturing process uh thanks to you guys for watching like this video

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if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment letting us know would you like to see more of this

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kind of behind the scenes Factory and

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and product validation coverage from us

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please let us know because otherwise we don't know what you want to see um guys

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check out the video description for uh link to buy a cool t-shirt like the ones

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I normally wear you can also give us a monthly contribution or change your

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thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe thanks a lot