I hope this is the right place to put this. I want to make a little thread about my process making wood and corian and other types of keycaps. More than just "heres some caps, pay me!". I want to detail the process and update on progress. Thanks for looking.
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So about 6-8 months ago I got the idea to make some keycaps from wood. I have a CNC mill that I built from scratch and got underway.
Some initial designs...
Although, the first thing I discovered was that any and every 3d model reference you could find online of a keycap, be it cherry, oem or otherwise is completely wrong. Not usable at all. No stem offset, bad shape, heights, etc.
So I wound up needing to design my own "cherry" profile.
The next issue was the stem. Most wood keycaps, (and many artisan in general), use some sort of cat epoxy resin stem. Oof. Not ideal because they tend not to hold their shapoe and stay snug.. I decided i needed something a lot better. i tried 3d printed them in nylon.
That went poorly as nylon is super flexible. Gummy stems! Hana. I tried 3d printed stainless steel. That was also a fail for the opposite reason. Zero flex and no real ability to fine tune the fit. The tolerances on the prints were quite bad. Finally i just decided to machine them. I got some really tiny bits and milled them from delrin (POM). These turned out great. Super snug and dont lose their shape even after removing and reinstalling 100 times.
On to the caps then. I did a number of trials and tests, and eventually ahd to give up on my cherry profile caps for now, because it was difficult to find a way to fixture them securely.
I switched to a square sided keycap design to get something going. We will revisit cherry later, but for now, I could do r4 escape caps and low profile style caps.
In the mean time though, we need some graphics. There are not really many choices for graphics on wood. You can use a decal, which will wear off in short order. You can use laser to engrave some thing but it will tend not to be very readable except on light woods. Last, you can inlay. I chose to engrave pockets and then inlay epoxy paste to create a double shot (and triple shot) style cap in wood.
With that sorted, I could start on "production". It is not too hard to make 1 keycap. It is another thing to try and make 50 efficiently and cost effectively. I made a variety of fixtures for holding the caps, and some for sanding them, and one for settng in then stems.
I could now set about making a bundle of caps in different woods and inlay designs.
I should add in here, gluing delrin stems was complicated. Delrin doesn't really like to stick to anything. In the end 3M sent me a care package of things that managed to let me glue the delrin to the wood.
Next on the list was finishing. Inevitably anything you put on these will wear off, so I wanted something the user could easily touch up and repair themselves. I wound up sanding them to 600-1500 grit (depends on the wood) and putting osmo polyx oil on them. This is a wax oil that acts as a barrier to moisture, and a tiny $25 can will last 1000s of keycaps. Heavy users could touch up the keys once or twice a year and keep them looking brand new indefinitely.
Last on the to do list was packaging. When you only need a handful of boxes, it is surprisingly expensive to package a keycap. Little printer boxes with foam cost as much as $15 each, and off the shelf jewelery boxes while cheap, increase shipping costs $5-$15 due to the size. i decided i would just make my own packaging. Oof. Nightmare, although in the end, i think it was worth the effort. I decided to make blister packs. Went through a number of tests and iterations for vacuum forming and printing.
That's it for now. I will keep this thread going with updates on new designs, cherry profiles, different key positions (spacebars etc) and new processes. Please ask any questions you like about the process. If you like the caps, there are a handful in my etsy store at the moment.
