Thanks, I'm in the Bay Area also - do you have any recommendations for good places? The place I've been talking to at the moment seems sort of hesitant (and didn't even suggest plugs or anything, which I had to Google myself).
I actually tried two different local places, and was unhappy with both. There is an outfit in Oklahoma I used for kind of a hard, oddball job, and they were very good, but kind of expensive. Also, that was a few years ago, I don't know if things are the same with them. Let me know if you want a reference and I'll dig up the paperwork, I can't remember the name offhand.
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I also tried to look up the differences between powder coating and cerakoting and couldn't figure out if there's a strong reason to go one or the other for a keyboard that will see mainly desk use. Any expertise that you can offer there?
Really appreciate the help.
Cerakote is a ceramic coating. It is used frequently on guns. It is very hard and scratch/heat resistant - substantially harder than powder coating. It is also thinner - it is possible to coat threads, down to some tolerance I can't remember. It costs a fair amount more because it is proprietary, requires special equipment, etc.
My comment about that was a bit of a joke, if not funny. There's really no good reason to use it on a keyboard, in terms of what it is used for - if you're abusing your keyboard that much, there's something else wrong. But, if you like the look of it (it does look distinctive, depending on the color), go for it. Some shops out there also do really fancy stencils and whatnot with it. If you want to look at example fancy applications and don't mind looking at guns, see
https://www.cerakoteguncoatings.com/gallery/ . Of course, you'll pay for fancy.
I'd offer to help, but I'm really not very good at powder coating because I hate doing it and the shop I do it at has a poor setup that sometimes causes botched jobs due to people opening the wrong door at the wrong time. And I would hate to do a crappy job on your VE.A.