What I've wanted for a long time is a big battleship ALPS board.
But even the ones that exist, like the Ortek MCK-142, tend to have layout issues (BAE). The best straight-ANSI ALPS boards tended to be straight 101 or 104 only.
BlindAssassin111's project changed everything. I had been waiting on the second round of GH-122 with promised ALPS support, but dropped everything, ordered a Omnikey 102 I could part out, and went from there.
The 102 and the Ultra-T share a plate and most of the casing, but you have to rip three openings in the case for the extra keys. There's also a bullet-proof sticker over that spot.
Mine had a remarkably rust-free plate, so I decided to coat it with Rustoleum primer and black paint. The paint seems to scratch if you look at it funny, and you have to be pretty aggressive to fit the switches and inserts in. Matias switches grip the hole in a different way than classic ALPS.
I tried cleaning caps with denture tabs, but there's a lot of discolouration on some keys (space bar) and some are simply shiny. I suspect I'm going to use mostly Tai-Hao Olivette and some fill-in from an old FK-9000... but the nonstandard numpad keys are a hard match.
Soldering the LEDs is the worst bit of the project for me. I decided to add little risers under the LEDs (scavenged from an old cheap plastic-plate board, since I threw out the broken wreckage of the original Northgate board) and desoldering was nearly impossible.
I'm proceeding slowly from here; I ordered a USB cable for the hole in the bottom tray, but it's coming slow-boat from China I know you can route the cable through the foot, but that seems second-best.
Not sure if I want to go for a cleaned up retro look, or to dye it; BlindAssassin111's grey one is very sexy.