---May 27th, 2018---
Last we left off, the keyboard was here. I had welded all the acrylic pieces together and the final shape was there. From here on out, everything I would do is very much final and any mistakes I make are mistakes I have to live with.
The the first step was to fill in a few holes where the stabilizers pop through the "PCB" plate. The other holes are mostly all self-sealing. These were the only ones I was particularly concerned about.
Mixing it up on a piece of paper with tooth-pics, very professional.
Filling the holes.
The next step was to use some AlumiUV resin. This is a a one part resin that cures in UV light. The idea here is that I can use this resin to quickly cover then seal and holes there might be in the "PCB" plate before pouring in something that takes several hours to cure completely (which would give lots of time for resin to find a way through cracks).
I put a dollop on the inside of the wrist rest for testing and put it in the sun. No good. It was cloudy and taking too long.
I had a UV grow light, but I had a feeling the wavelengths were off and it wasn't powerful enough. After a half hour it was still very much uncured.
So I grabbed the whole thing and went to a nail salon. The Vietnamese women were very confused about what I wanted to do, but were also completely willing to let me sit at a station with my keyboard for FREE! for about a half hour. Sorry for the lack of pics. For obvious reasons I was trying to move quickly. This time it worked. In ~5 minutes the resin was very hot and very hard, but I made sure to do two sets of 5 minutes since only half of the keyboard fit at once.
Bubbles . . . Large bubbles. Ugh, so big and ugly. Maybe I was moving too fast and didn't give time for the resin to get everywhere it needed to be.
My original plan after seeing these was to drill two holes, one inlet and one air escape, and then inject resin into the space of the bubbles to fill them. In the next photo you'll see why I elected against this.
The next morning I went to test the board before proceeding and two of the switches were slow to respond. They were gunked up with semi-cured resin. If I were to try and fill those large air holes I was worried I would create this problem for other switches.
These were a bear to get open. Not only were they semi-glued shut, but I didn't leave any space for the tabs of the switch tops to slide past the mounting holes in the plate. I ultimately had to cut them off. The little tabs are now loose between the mounting plate and the "PCB" plate. Oh well. I always said this was an experiment.
After cleaning out the bottom of the housing and putting in a new spring and plunger, I realized I couldn't get the switch tops on. The little pegs were too big.
I grabbed my utility knife and shaved off parts of the tabs.
On the left you can see the shaved tabs, on the right the unmodified tabs.
And back on. You can see the little tabs under the plate, but none of the switches are sticky now. I'll take it.
For casting, I chose Alumilite Amazing Clear Cast. There were a few reasons for this. I won't have access to a pressure pot big enough to fit a whole keyboard into, so I need a way to try and minimize bubbles. This has a long pot life, so that will give the bubbles a relatively long time to rise to the surface and pop.
The first cast of the wrist rest. I'm going to marble the wrist rest with gold leaf since the hardline wiring of the keyboard will be obscured by the keycaps. This will give a nice nod to what's hiding below.
Here's the first cast of the keyboard. I'll do this in a few takes as well, although it's not as necessary since I'm just trying to get everything covered and even instead of getting metal flakes embedded throughout.
I'm hoping to get the casting complete in the next couple days. I'll post once it's finished. After that it's onto sanding and polishing the keyboard, wrist rest, and keycaps.
Thanks for reading!
