so ive been getting back into CW after maybe a 15 year break and honestly its been humbling. i picked up a used Bencher paddle and hooked it up to my K3 internal keyer and at slower speeds like 15-18 wpm it sounds pretty clean but once i start pushing past 22 or so the dits start getting squished or sometimes i get extra characters showing up. not sure if its my paddle tension being off or the iambic mode or honestly maybe just my fist being rusty after all these years.

been practicing with the Koch method on the computer and im up to copying about 20 wpm reasonably well but sending is just lagging behind. anyone else gone through this re-learning curve? is there something specific i should be checking on the paddle itself or the keyer settings? the dit/dah ratio feels right when i go slow but maybe its drifting at speed. i genuinely cant tell if its hardware or just me.

the paddle adjustment is almost certainly part of it. with a Bencher BY-1 or similar the spring tension and the contact gap both matter a lot at higher speeds and most used paddles come way out of spec. what i usually do is set the gap to about the thickness of a business card on each side and then back the tension spring off until the paddle returns crisply but doesnt feel stiff. it takes some fiddling honestly.

also worth checking which iambic mode your K3 is set to. mode A vs mode B behave differently when you release both paddles at the same time and a lot of people find one feels much more natural than the other. i switched from mode B to mode A years ago and it cleaned up a ton of my sloppy sending. the keyer speed adjustment should also have a weight setting — if dits are getting squished sometimes the weight is slightly off from the default. try bumping it up just a hair. but yeah some of it is also just muscle memory and it does come back, it just takes a few weeks of consistent time with the paddle every day even if only 10-15 minutes.

im kind of in the same boat, been at it about 8 months now and the sending catching up to copying took me way longer than i expected. one thing that actually helped me was slowing WAY back down, like uncomfortably slow, and just doing super clean sending for a while instead of always pushing speed. my elmer told me sloppy fast reps just wire in the bad habits and i think he was right because once i cleaned up at 15 i jumped to 22 pretty fast after that.