How are keycap moulds made?

[mintyfruits]

Recently I've been more curious about the actual mould for keycaps are made. This was kind of sparked from a couple of things. The first being the nature of Signature Plastics SA profile caps and how sought after they are. As the community is well aware, Maxkey recently started producing SA profile caps. The second thing that go me thinking was when I saw a posted about how there isn't an ISO DSA enter key (DCS is used instead). This lead me to believe the following: the moulds are extremely expensive to make, the moulds are extremely difficult to make, or a combination of both. For instance,

So, could anyone maybe link me, or explain to me how the moulds are made? Or the tooling? I have read several articles on Deskthority about the production of keycaps, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot about the moulds!

[HotRoderX]

I am curious also! I read or have read that custom novelty molds can cost upward's of several thousands dollars each to produce! I am wondering if there made from cnc steel are what! Perhaps there made from some type of super strong synthetic material?

[AuthenticDanger]

How It's Made Plastic injection molds:

[mintyfruits]

Thanks for the video! I've done some work in machine shops, so this makes quite a bit more sense to me now. The moulds must be very expensive to produce. I'd be curious to hear a dollar figure and time spent making keycap moulds.

[Joey Quinn]

Good molds are expensive and time consuming to make & design + they can only go through so many cycles before they start producing faulty caps.

[romevi]

[mintyfruits]

Good molds are expensive and time consuming to make & design + they can only go through so many cycles before they start producing faulty caps.

Does that mean that they have to remake the mould every so often?

[HotRoderX]

holy crap no wonder keycap molds are so expensive the amount of time energy and work that goes into them. Thanks for the video that was really cool and really crazy.

[sneaky101]

Good molds are expensive and time consuming to make & design + they can only go through so many cycles before they start producing faulty caps.

Does that mean that they have to remake the mould every so often?

The novelty key moulds (only legends) at Signature Plastics are made out of brass and are machined in-house because brass is soft and easy to work with. Such "mould" can be used 200-300 times depending on complexity, and it's cheap to reproduce. They do this because novelty keycaps aren't a standard item and in most cases a group buy will only commission 800-2000 keycaps with these legends.

The actual key moulds are made out of steel and are extremely expensive, heavy and sophisticated. They can last between 500,000 and 1m injections. Some moulds can go as far as 1.5m injections because the manufacturer didn't cheapen out on the materials or designed them very efficiently. The reason they deteriorate is due to ABS plastic injections eating into the metal and breaking down the mould at molecular level over time.

Maxkey uses B grade moulds from Signature Plastics or whoever else that had the same shaped moulds and that's why their keycaps are slightly less consistent (wobbly legends). They are still great but after 200k-300k injections their keys won't be as nice as they are today. The "Shif t" legend mould is made out of steel and that's why they took a long time to correct it. They could've machined new brass Shift legend moulds to satisfy the customers but it becomes very inefficient to do it every 250 sets.

Edit:
source for injection mould durability: http://www8.basf.us//PLASTICSWEB/displayanyfile?id=0901a5e180004878
source for novelty key manufacturing process by SP: https://www.keychatter.com/2016/10/11/interview-melissa-with-signature-plastics/

[bluesclera]

Good molds are expensive and time consuming to make & design + they can only go through so many cycles before they start producing faulty caps.

Does that mean that they have to remake the mould every so often?

The novelty key moulds (only legends) at Signature Plastics are made out of brass and are machined in-house because brass is soft and easy to work with. Such "mould" can be used 200-300 times depending on complexity, and it's cheap to reproduce. They do this because novelty keycaps aren't a standard item and in most cases a group buy will only commission 800-2000 keycaps with these legends.

The actual key moulds are made out of steel and are extremely expensive, heavy and sophisticated. They can last between 500,000 and 1m injections. Some moulds can go as far as 1.5m injections because the manufacturer didn't cheapen out on the materials or designed them very efficiently. The reason they deteriorate is due to ABS plastic injections eating into the metal and breaking down the mould at molecular level over time.

Maxkey uses B grade moulds from Signature Plastics or whoever else that had the same shaped moulds and that's why their keycaps are slightly less consistent (wobbly legends). They are still great but after 200k-300k injections their keys won't be as nice as they are today. The "Shif t" legend mould is made out of steel and that's why they took a long time to correct it. They could've machined new brass Shift legend moulds to satisfy the customers but it becomes very inefficient to do it every 250 sets.

Just out of curiosity how much would it cost to make a complete set of grade A moulds? 50,000, $100,000?

[ergo_guy]

I've heard $3000 is how much each of the new molds for MT3 cost, but I'm sure that the cost varies between the actual keys, with larger more complex ones like spacebars and ISO enter being more expensive than simple one unit keys.  It would also make sense that double shot molds would cost more than ones for single shot keys like dev/tty MT3.

So if you just wanted a new keycap profile for an ortholinear keyboard that were single shot you would be looking to spend 15 to 20 thousand depending on if you wanted convex space keys and/or 2 unit keys, where as for just coverage of a standard 60% you would have to spend around 45-50 thousand.  This would be if each mold cost $3000, and they were singleshot, so you would have blanks or dye sub legends, and you wanted different row profiles.  If you wanted to do double shot it would be much more expensive maybe around 200 thousand dollars for a 60% keyboard, but I am not really sure.

This is just my somewhat uninformed opinion on the matter, if you really wanted to know you might want to talk to a keycap designer that has had sets with double shot novetlies.

EDIT: I just saw the above post about novetlies, so your best option would be to talk to matt3o, the designer of the MT3 profile.

[mintyfruits]

Thanks for the responses! I'm not actually looking to have any keys made; I was just curious about the process.

[sneaky101]

Yeah, 3000 for a simple mould. Upwards of 10k for bigger keys. Seen here is Signature Plastics making 4 keys with double injection process.  The white part was made earlier by a similar machine and they have to manually place them into the main mould.
Luckily they have a "multiple cavity mould" which can make 4 keys at a time. Say a simple mould would cost 3k to make, a multi-cavity one could cost 6k, so some manufacturers will pay double to get quadruple, and that's where costs add up. In the long run it's better because they don't wear the mould out as fast.

They have to keep track of how many legends they make, on which key profile row and how many sets of keys. It's a hideous process to make such a wide variety of keys VS making TV remotes where the job is to just keep pumping out the same thing 100,000 times.

[HotRoderX]

most likely stupid but wonder what the cost effectiveness of using something like titanium would be? I would assume that far outlast steel even if it did cost 10x's as much it could be worth it. buy once cry once!. I would assume someone like GMK is replacing there molds every 6 months to a year.. perhaps? They seem to be insanely popular!


Also JTK which I don't see a lot and am told its cause there legends are wonky! ((which typing on JTK now and really like them and can't find legend issues)) are they perhaps using b stock also?

[ergo_guy]

most likely stupid but wonder what the cost effectiveness of using something like titanium would be? I would assume that far outlast steel even if it did cost 10x's as much it could be worth it. buy once cry once!. I would assume someone like GMK is replacing there molds every 6 months to a year.. perhaps? They seem to be insanely popular!


Also JTK which I don't see a lot and am told its cause there legends are wonky! ((which typing on JTK now and really like them and can't find legend issues)) are they perhaps using b stock also?

I don't think that it would be worth it, for one titanium is not that easy to machine, and I think that if it was more cost efficient they would be using it already.  Just because titanium is stronger that steel does not necessarily make it a better material to make molds out of.  But I could be wrong, maybe it would be better.


I feel like gmk is probably not repacing their moulds every 6 months to a year, because as sneaky said they can last around a million cycles and I don't think that they would make that many of a given key per year. 

Lets take Nautilus as an example, there were 1899 base kits sold, so lets just say 2000, even if there was a group buy of that size every week of the year (which there isn't), then they would be making 104,000 of a given key a year.  At that rate they would wear a mould out every 5 to 10 years using sneaky's wear rating of 500,000 to 1,000,000 cycles.

I don't how many keys they produce using the cherry moulds outside of groupbuys, so if groupbuys are only 10% of the cycles on those moulds then they could get worn out in 6 months or a years time.