"My first real keyboard"

[dec.net]

Hi Guys, since I started lurking here about a few months ago, I've been looking forward to the moment the postman rang and handed me a large box... and today the time was right!

After a long series of ok-but-somewhat-disappointing keyboards - Logitech Wireless ergonomic thingy, Logitech cheap black thingy, Creative Labs Prodikeys DM which at least had the novelty factor for including a musical keyboard that unfortunately never quite worked - my 1993 Lexmark/IBM Model M 1391403 (German layout) finally arrived. I guess it's not a bad start at all! It's not "new and shiny" clean, but clean enough for my taste, a bit of discoloring on the Spacebar, but nothing a dishwasher cycle couldn't fix I guess.


Also I noticed a rather strange keycap on it, which the seller included separately. It's the size of a Ctrl/Alt key, and labelled "Grdst" on top, "Abbr" on the front, both in dark grey lettering on grey keycaps  - I guess it stands for "Grundstellung" (default position) and "Abbrechen" (abort).  Those are of course rather generic terms, so I can't say where exactly this is coming from, but I'm guessing they might have been part of some technical/industrial layout - or even just part of a 122 key terminal layout thingy.


Typing on the thing is an actual revelation for me. It seems like my usual typing errors are right now reduced by about 80%, but I might be fooling myself over it, since I'm obviously somewhat more focussed on typing right now than I would be usually with my other boards.

I've only come into contact with buckling spring keyboards at University - I'm working at the Ancient History department as an assistant, and the former secretary (it's now >20 years past her retirement) is still coming in every week or so to type some ancient greek script on an obscure old PC running WordPerfect, using her IBM Model M - I noticed that the other guys in the department seemed to be rather keen on "inheriting" that thing, once the old lady decides that the days of WordPerfect might be finally over for her. So I gave it a try and was quickly convinced.

So the next plans would be: Dye some keys (WASD? GH?) "fake IBM blue", convert to USB internally, possibly change the LED color to blue as well, but I guess any usual blue LED might be too harsh actually. Any tips/recommendations on that?

Also, if anybody could point my in the direction of some ancient greek (aka polytonic greek) keycaps, I'd be rather thankful - guess that might have been a bit too exotic even for IBM. Best I could find so far was a plain modern greek layout.

Chris

[2084]

Also, if anybody could point my in the direction of some ancient greek (aka polytonic greek) keycaps, I'd be rather thankful - guess that might have been a bit too exotic even for IBM. Best I could find so far was a plain modern greek layout.

Chris

greekhack.org! Sorry I don't have anything useful to say. Congrats on your keyboard tho

[sixty]

greekhack.org! Sorry I don't have anything useful to say. Congrats on your keyboard tho

Lol, that was quite amusing.
Welcome to geekhack @ OP. It only goes downhill from here. Prepare to spend a lot of money or disable your account ASAP.

[keyb_gr]

It's not "new and shiny" clean, but clean enough for my taste, a bit of discoloring on the Spacebar, but nothing a dishwasher cycle couldn't fix I guess.

Don't throw the whole board in the dishwasher though, just the keys (actually a bowl of warm water and a few denture cleaning tabs plus dishwashing detergent should do a fine job). A bit of yellowing on the spacebar is not unusual, different material. Speaking of which, remove it carefully to avoid damage.

Typing on the thing is an actual revelation for me. It seems like my usual typing errors are right now reduced by about 80%, but I might be fooling myself over it, since I'm obviously somewhat more focussed on typing right now than I would be usually with my other boards.

That's a typical observation actually. I can type faster on something with MX blues, but accuracy tends to be a little better on a BS board with its higher force and seemingly infinite key spacing (rough approximation).

So the next plans would be: Dye some keys (WASD? GH?) "fake IBM blue", convert to USB internally, possibly change the LED color to blue as well, but I guess any usual blue LED might be too harsh actually. Any tips/recommendations on that?

Not a big fan of blue LEDs actually, have too much problems with halos around them (their wavelength tends to be in a range that the human eye can't focus very well any more). You most definitely don't want any high efficiency types. Try white, yellow, orange or red.

Also, if anybody could point my in the direction of some ancient greek (aka polytonic greek) keycaps, I'd be rather thankful - guess that might have been a bit too exotic even for IBM. Best I could find so far was a plain modern greek layout.

I guess you'll be out of luck there, it doesn't seem like polytonic Greek was an official layout back when the Model M ruled. The folks at Unicomp might be able to make something, but I very much doubt they'd go through the trouble for one single board.

[dec.net]

Thanks for the warm welcome, everybody!

Always thought APL looked Greek or at least Phoenician.

Actually, coming across your APL keyed Space Saver (which is an incredibly sexy piece of kit btw), those symbols first gave me the idea of looking for an ancient greek layout.

Well, obviously the big problem with polytonic greek is that 99% of the people who need it don't know too much about computers - generally speaking, they'd rather crossreference all occurrences of a greek word in the entire corpus of known texts by hand than do a Google search on 'what does Unicode mean and why should I use it to speed up searches for greek words' or 'how do I make my OS switch Input language'.

So everybody is constantly reinventing the wheel and there are all sorts of different keymaps around, usually accompanied by some obscure wrapping font that some guy developed singlehandedly for personal/academic use back in the 1980s. Even nowadays, the Linux and Windows mappings for polytonic greek differ quite a lot between each other, so you always have to rethink.

Not a big fan of blue LEDs actually, have too much problems with halos around them (their wavelength tends to be in a range that the human eye can't focus very well any more). You most definitely don't want any high efficiency types. Try white, yellow, orange or red.

Thanks, the halo you describe is exactly what I want to avoid for my board. I think I might settle for a deep orange in a desperate attempt to copy the color scheme on Ripster's Space Saver.

Chris

[Sam]

Always thought APL looked Greek or at least Phoenician.

Show Image

The Rare Blue Dialect

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You just had to go and post another pic of your APL Spacesaver, didn't you?  Now I'm going to be drooling over that pic all day.  Hurry up and put that board up for sale, Ripster.  I gotta get me one like that.

[Pylon]

Also, if anybody could point my in the direction of some ancient greek (aka polytonic greek) keycaps, I'd be rather thankful - guess that might have been a bit too exotic even for IBM. Best I could find so far was a plain modern greek layout.

Chris

You might be able to get Unicomp to print some custom keys for you, but that's going to cost quite a bit.

[woody]

Dye like a man.

[itlnstln]

Dye hard, then.

[dec.net]

Hmm... Just ordered me some Rit dye from ebay.co.uk, my color of choicewould have been Eve Blue, however as this wasn't available anywhere, Royal Blue seems to be close. But to keep me busy while waiting for packages from a crafts shop in the UK during the busiest time of the year for crafts shops and mailmen alike, I gots me some Kukident "Die Blauen" denture cleaning tabs (I have to suppose from the stuff written on the package that they are even more intense than normal Kukident - or at least that my keyboard will fill the room with a pleasant smell of mint and menthol) to clean the keycaps.

Unfortunately, I've already got all the caps undone and they are sitting in a bowl with four Kukidents as I'm typing this, so the keeping-me-busy-over-the-holidays plan probably won't work out quite as well as intended. Well, wouldn't want to  be too busy to dye anyway, to keep with the general flow of the debate.

Chris

[dec.net]

So I let the tabs do their thing and the keycaps are drying as I type. However, the results are somewhat mixed: Basically, all the caps are clean, sure, but I wonder what happened to the promised smell of mint and menthol? After a rinse of clean water (which is pretty much necessary, since I certainly don't want the remaining blueish foam to dry in on the cleaned caps), there is no smell left at all!

Call me a noob for displaying exaggerated affection to my new hobby, but basically I wouldn't mind my keyboard to command a general assault on all senses - it's got feeling and hearing covered by default, the visual assault is coming soon with the blue dye, but smell has to remain neglected, as it is too often the case in these sterilized, disconnected days. What a world we're living in - you can't even trust the denture cleaning industry no more.

Chris

[woody]

So to summarize this whole thread in two words.

Dye, Hard.

What an older coworker once said:
During the day, we're all hardware guys. During the night though, we're all software guys.

No hard feelings.

[dec.net]

And to resurrect a dying thread, here are some crappy pics of my Model M with orange LEDs in its natural habitat. Intensity on these things is slightly on the high side, but they aren't painful to look at.

Also, I have a question to some experience Model M users - obviously for the LED-mod I opened it up and had a look at the plastic "rivets" (looks to me like they actually pushed these things on a hot surface at the factory). I was considering to bolt mod them in the future, but couldn't exactly find any of them missing. I was wondering if they just come loose with time, or do they actually pop off?

Chris

[msiegel]

i think orange should be the new color for keyboard leds.

getting tired of blue.

[msiegel]

they just come loose with time, or do they actually pop off?

mine did both (on a mini)...

a few were already missing, and a few were so loose they could be popped off with very little force.

edit: i think the plastic stretches as they weaken. soon after i received my board, the P stopped registering reliably. its nearby rivet was easy to remove.

[dec.net]

Hmm, so I guess I'm pretty much on the safe side... They are all rather solid on my board. I didn't push every last one of them to see wether they got half a millimeter of play, but they all are most certainly firmly attached (not easily popped off). So I guess I can consider myself rather lucky... Okay, so the board was €45 and not a dustbin special, it'd better be at least decent, but with my recent luck I already went through everything that could go wrong.
Once my blue dye is in the mail, it'll be pretty much perfection I supposed... until the next project arrives, and it certainly will. I already wonder what a Model F feels like, and I'd certainly like to have some cherry blues... Also, I HATE CapsLock, at least in the standard position. So I do fancy a UNIX-layout mechanical board. Let's see, the blind man said.

Chris

[dec.net]

Royal Blue dye has arrived (surprisingly quick shipping from the UK - can really recommend the ebay.co.uk seller swincraft), so I thought the time was right. Turns out, it was a so-so day to dye actually.



After cleaning the keys with denture tabs and rinsing them in alcohol to get rid of any oils, I almost-boiled the keys in the dye-solution at around 92-95°C (says my multimeter's thermo sensor) for 10 minutes, with a bit of salt and washing detergent. The color turned out nicely (it actually has a hint of purple, just like IBM blue), but the coverage was a little uneven around the edges. On the 5 key, I also got a few lighter spots right in the center. Does anybody have an idea what that might come from and how to avoid it in the future? Do I have to clean them even better, or should I actually avoid the salt and washing detergent (guess it any particles stick to the keys during the initial phase of the process, this might give such a spotted result)?

Also, I tried to color three white caps (f,j,5) and a grey cap (esc) at the same time - it turned out as it was to be expected by anyone with a brain (obviously excluding me): As soon as the color on the white caps was strong enough, the color on the grey one was already getting too dark. Should have dyed them separately.


So I actually did something else for the esc-key: Trim a spare keystem - the seller was nice enough to include three extras with the board - and glue on an anthrazite colored key from my previous keyboard after getting rid of its stem with a side-cutter and carving knifes. The color and font fits very well, but obviously it's a bit shorter than those ridiculously large Model M caps.

Overall, I'm about 80% content with the results. The color scheme is really nice with the anthrazite/blue/white keys and orange leds, and if you don't look too closely, you don't see the spots on those keys - however, I am the type who does occasionally look closely.

Again, I'm sorry for the crappy photos, I don't possess a camera, and even with two strong lightbulbs set right at those keycaps, I can't get my phone to photograph much more than noise.

Chris

[Pylon]

Sixty has a great looking Industrial M w/ orange LEDs.
http://keyboardporn.com/buckling-spring/ibm-industrial-diy-version/

[didjamatic]

Sixty has a great looking Industrial M w/ orange LEDs.
http://keyboardporn.com/buckling-spring/ibm-industrial-diy-version/

Custom IBM logo too, nice touch.

[dec.net]

Really can't decide wether I'd prefer that or Ripster's APL Space Saver. Really, really nice. I'd really like to find out wether those "custom rgb keycaps" are dyed or a special production run...

Chris

[WhiteRice]

Really can't decide wether I'd prefer that or Ripster's APL Space Saver. Really, really nice. I'd really like to find out wether those "custom rgb keycaps" are dyed or a special production run...

Chris

Unicomp sells them. They are very affordable.

[WhiteRice]

When I last inquired they did not specify.

I love the red/white/blue color keys. They always remind me of...

[Pylon]

Is Unicomp still selling those  colored keycaps for two piece keys?  I thought Webwit had Chuck go in the back room and he bought them all out?  Or it might have been the Industrial Grey tops....

According to Sixty's site, webwit bought out the entire remainder of those Industrial Gray tops.

http://keyboardporn.com/buckling-spring/ibm-industrial-diy-version/

This is a keyboard I assembled myself out of several spare parts, most of them kindly supplied by webwit. In late 2010 webwit ordered a bunch of leftover IBM Model M Industrial cases from Unicomp and sent me a spare one along with some other goodies.