hey everyone. i've been living off a phone for internet and the floor for sleeping for the last week and have been unable to keep on schedule with production on this. as i mentioned before, we're being very careful with the waterjet cut of the plates. we need to make sure that the tolerances we're getting for the cheaper cut method we're using will be sufficient and if not, we will rejigger the drawing to make sure the plates come out properly. to this end, the WJ has been waiting to make a sample cut for me while i, ironically, move out of his area. thankfully, i've found someone down south to pick up the samples and post them to me so that i can take the necessary measurements and check fitment. since we're dealing with cuts on 3000$ worth of metal stock here, i am not going to screw around with the final cut. measure 10 times, cut once. my unavailability has delayed this process about 3 weeks now, unfortunately, but now that i'm slightly more stable (i'm at least sleeping on a couch right now), jd and i can go over the samples and drawings with a fine toothed comb.
in the next order of business, in fitting vibex's gasket, he found an interesting property which could be either a feature or a potential pitfall. basically, a fastener system that is a single long bolt coming in from the top through a hole in the sorbothane and a nut at the bottom to secure the bolt allows you to squish the gasket to nearly whatever height you want on each of the four corners. the gasket is nominally 1/2" in height, but is very squishy, as it's 30O material. this is cool in that you can build in your own slant at the top of the keyboard, as there is a little extra room between the bottom plate and the PCB (the teensy is the real reason it must be 1/2", otherwise it could be much thinner). however, it's a bit harder to get exactly 1/2" on all four corners. you have to manually measure the distance between plates as you tighten the nut.
JD's original design uses a spacer nut that is exactly 1/2" and then is secured to each plate by a machine screw. this is a nice solution and looks nice when you don't use the gasket, but you won't be able to see the spacer if you use the gasket, and the spacer nuts are bit pricey, actually. anyway, curious to hear what options people would prefer.
finally, people have been asking about pricing on teensies. frankly, we can't give a much lower price than pjrc on teensies. the MOQ on quantity pricing is larger than our total possible order, so the only real benefit is that we can save internationals some shipping costs by buying teensies and packing them with the kits. my feeling is that i should just put the teensies up on the shop for pjrc's pricing (because that's pretty much what we're going to pay), and you will be able to put your kit order number in the notes for combined shipping. thoughts?
