Hey y'all. Glad to be here. I'm firmly a budget guy for my regular stuff, though I like ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the pretty shiny things. I have made a couple of custom RP2040 handwired ortho boards, one a Planck with an extra column and the other a hard-wired split. They're perfectly functional but clearly the work of a newbie. Looking forward to upping my game here. Next project is a set of aluminum plates from KLE and swill's plate generator that are on their way from the Xometry (hoping that I didn't cheap out too much... we'll see). I tweaked the TKL layout to have just a bit more of a retro vibe without making it too alien to use. Plan is to hand-wire and make a simple sandwich case with the sides made from walnut out of my woodshop scrap bin.
For my (SUPERBUDGET!!!!!) pre-builts, in addition to switching out stock cheap switches and keycaps for aftermarket cheap switches and keycaps that I like better, I've also re-soldered the hotswaps on one budget board (LTC Neon 75... MF'ers kept popping loose when I was changing switches) and added foam and weight to the single cheapest hotswap 1800 that I could find on Amazon. I have another (FL-Esports 980) where a pad lifted, and I just cannot get it to work reliably, so I'm going to leverage the steel plate and convert the whole thing into a handwired. Got a matrix done up that is pretty wonky, but should be physically possible to wire and get onto an MCU with 20 GPIO pins.