So it was about two months ago when I promised photos of my HHKB Rit dye-job. Life got in the way, alas. I wasn't even able to log into GH for what seems like an eon, and returning for the first time since late January, it's good to see that my Asteroids record is still standing.
Anyway, behold the photos, if you wish.
I own two HHKB Pro 2 keyboards: one is tethered to the computer in my home office, and I use another with my laptop and at work (the "portable" keyboard). Starting off, this is my "portable" HHKB:
Please note that I couldn't obtain ideal lighting conditions, and that the camera flash is making the colors seem brighter than they actually are. Especially the blue, which is much more sedate in real life: it's more of a metallic blue than the neon blue portrayed in the photo.
I'm very happy with how this turned out. I think it's lovely, in fact. I wanted the red escape key, the yellow Fn key, color-indicated number keys, and color-accented modifier keys. I didn't want too many bright colors, or even highly contrasting colors. I.e., I wanted the keyboard to still look like a quality, professional tool, rather than a cheap eye-grabbing trinket. I did much experimentation, and this was the best color combo I could come up with.
(Although I'm still trying to decide whether to keep the tab key black, or swap back the blue. I'm pretty happy with how it is, but it continues to nag at me.)
For reference, the colors are:
-- Esc: "Scarlet"
-- Fn: "Golden Yellow"
-- Modifier keys: "Royal Blue"
-- Number keys: "Purple"
Now brace yourself, because the next keyboard gets a little wacky ...
I started with the color scheme of the portable HHKB and took it a few steps further.
The primary difference: my wife doesn't like the lack of cursor-control keys on the HHKB Pro, so I color-coded the arrow keys, to make it more palatable for her use. Also, the tab/delete keys have colors from previous experiments, which my wife also liked. I'm not crazy about this color scheme, although I don't hate it, and I'm happy that my wife is happy. It goes without saying that I like the color scheme of my portable HHKB much better.
I did lots of color-swapping, seeing if various colors worked on various keyboards, especially with the orange or "wine" tab/del keys, and I was never quite happy with how they looked on the "portable" keyboard. They always upset the color balance and/or made it look gaudy or cheap. (Tab and Del are the same size, on the same row, so they can be swapped.) In fact, I had originally hoped to have an orange delete key on the portable keyboard, but it just didn't look right. My wife loved the orange key, however, and it looked better in the tab position than in the delete position, so it lives there now.
One neat thing I did: I put more than two keys with nipples on the keyboard. In particular, now the "a" and ";" keys have nipples, which (a) feels much more natural than just having them on "f" and "j" keys, and (b) it provides some indexing for finding the functionized arrow keys when you're using your small right finger to hold down the Fn key. Now, using the function keys is fabulously natural. I'm wondering why PFU didn't think of this in the first place.
(You may notice that the "F" and "J" keys on the desktop keyboard are slightly off-color from the surrounding black keys. This is because they were white to start with, and "Rit black" dyes a white key to slightly darker than stock HHKB black. Yeah, the discolor bugs me a little bit, but not enough to spend $80 on a new set. I'd rather dye the rest of the black keys "Rit black" to get them even, which may happen sometime.)
(In case you're wondering, I did this so that I could have multiple nippled-keys on each keyboard. All of the stock black nippled keys went on the "portable" keyboard, and the desktop keyboard all got dye-jobs.)
In addition to the above, the new colors on this keyboard are:
-- Arrow keys: "Teal"
-- Tab: "Sunshine Orange"
-- Delete: "Wine"
-- "F" and "J": "Black"
Some things I have learned about the process (much of this has been posted already, either by myself or others, but I'm mentioning it anyway):
-- Light colors work best. Avoid dark colors, as they all tend to approximate black, and even a nice job of "Dark Green", when juxtaposed with black keys, just doesn't look very good (IMHO). All the dark colors look muddy together.
-- "Navy Blue" approximates HHKB black better than Rit "Black" does. In fact, I can't tell the difference between a white key dyed with "Navy Blue" and a stock black HHKB key.
-- The dye-bath becomes more effective the longer it cooks. Even if it gets up to temp, the first key will take <15 minutes to dye up, but the next key will take only 5 minutes. I think the dye needs the time and heat to really get activated. Keys dyed during this time will also be have a better and more-consistent color tone. So I recommend that you let the dye-bath simmer for 15-20 minutes before attempting to dye your non-experimental keys.
-- The above is very important to note if you are dying more than one key in a bath simultaneously, to achieve uniform tone. (If this is the case, remove all the keys from the bath simultaneously (e.g., dump into a strainer), rather than one at a time, as the last key removed may be noticably darker than the first.)
-- When dying a key for the first time, always experiment with a key that you don't need, if you can help it. Additionally, always dye only one key at a time, unless you really need uniform tone (e.g., my number keys above). E.g., if you want to dye the esc. keys on two different keyboards red, do them separately, not together. This way, if the dying goes awry, you'll only screw up one key instead of two. My experiments were more unsuccessful than they were successful by roughly a factor of four. (I have an entire box of "reject keys" that I don't know what to do with.)
-- You apparently don't need to add salt, for color-fixing, but it doesn't hurt. Salt is important for dying fabric, so the color won't come out as much in the wash. Unless you plan on washing your keyboard with your laundry, you don't need to do this. (This info comes courtesy of a friend who used to follow around The Grateful Dead and make a living by selling tie-dyed shirts that she made herself. Although I should note that I used salt myself.)
-- Trying to dye the HHKB space bar will kill it. It will melt in the middle and warp. I don't know if this means that the space bar is of a different type of plastic than the other keys, or if its greater size makes it less resistant to heat stresses. I suspect the latter. If this is the case, then dying space bars of any keyboard may be problematic.
-- With the HHKB blank key set, the modifier keys are grey, while the others are white. Dying the grey keys works pretty well, although in most cases it does leave a slightly dirtier color. The darker you go, the less likely you'll notice it, but then again, getting a good dark color is difficult.
-- Keys, even if they're from the same keyboard, take the dye differently. Maybe it's damage during the stirring process. Maybe it's imperfections with the plastic. I'm not sure, but some keys will come out with streaks, spots, etc. that either aren't dyed at all, or (less frequently) are dyed too darkly. Interestingly, the flaws are more noticeable and more frequent with dyes of darker colors, which leads me to believe they may be related to the amount of time in the dye-bath. I.e., lighter colors can have a lot of extra time to saturate the key, while darker colors need to be yanked early to keep them from going black, and the imperfections don't get the exposure they need.
-- The above is very important to mind when dying multiple numbers of keys, especially if you want them to look flawless. When I did my number keys, I dyed all fourteen white keys from the top row, with the hope that at least ten of them would turn out fine. At the end, nine came out flawless, three had flaws that were negligible, and two had flaws that would probably annoy me.
That's it for now ... if I think of any other gee-whiz facts, I'll add them later.
