How heavy are these keycaps? Will the stock spring in the switches be plenty to hold up? Over time is there a chance of these wearing down the springs?
Cupronickel has 6-7 times the density of PBT plastic, and photos of the underside of these caps show a similar thickness to plastic caps.
After weighing my keyboard's PBT keycaps, I'd guess these would weigh about 7g for the regular 1U keycaps (give or take a bit depending on row), up to about 50g for the spacebar.
So the 1U keycaps should be fine with everything except the very lightest springs -- if your switches can return a 7U plastic spacebar, they can return a 1U cupronickel keycap.
The larger keycaps are more likely to have issues. e.g. one review of these says the spacebar and right-Shift were heavy enough that the reviewer's (63.5g linear) keyswitches had trouble returning. Not sure if he was listing his switches' actuation or bottom-out force.
So try finding something small that weighs about 50g (e.g. two AA batteries, twenty US pennies, ten US nickels) and balancing it on a single switch. Or balancing a 200g object on four switches, etc.
As for longevity, I have no idea. I don't know if keyswitches typically fail due to wear/corrosion on the spring, contacts, or the plastic housing/slider.
these are solid metal, not shine through in any way at all. the letters are supposed to be pretty fade resistant with how theyre applied but who knows long term. so you can have lighting behind them, i do, and it looks nice but it isnt really helping light up the top letters or anything. one thing thats interesting with them is that you can still see the letters perfectly fine without backlighting depending on the lighting around the kb and the angle you have the kb at, because the letters stand out quite a bit a lot of the time because they dont reflect light which makes them stand out from the rest of the keycap that is shiny. a sort of negative lettering effect. any sort of lighting coming off my monitor makes these very easy to read when the kb is at the right angle. theyre very different than any other keycaps, mostly in good ways though. i have had to adjust a lot of them to be a little tighter on the switches though, just a gentle squeeze with some pliers does the trick. some of them were just too loose and would pop off the switch entirely. i like them and would buy again if you were curious.
The linked PDF in the specifications shows the original closed stem design. Did Awekeys return to this closed stem design, or is the "adjustable" open stem design being used on this set? If the open stem design is still being used, has Awekeys found a way to make the stems more durable?
I would like this in blanks, but can't see an option even after clicking on 'preorder'. I don't to check out without the ability to select blanks. Is this indeed available in blanks? If so, how do I specify?