My adventure into key-cap making began in the weirdest of ways - an order of a mechanical (without keycaps) keyboard that hasn't arrived got me excited to look around for keycaps and lo and behold, I got entrapped in artisan keycaps.
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The resources of ZorbCaps, Booper, Binge and everyone on this platform has really allowed me to learn and to be excited about making something with my hands. I hail from Singapore and am in the creative industry so to have something to meddle with after work hours always excites me.
I'm currently at the stage where I'm waiting for my pressure pot to ship from UK (it's painfully difficult to find a decent pressure pot in Singapore) so that I can make higher quality casts.
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In Singapore, sourcing for materials necessary is extremely tricky. Being a tiny country (go ahead, look it up), there're just fewer resources here.
I managed to get a contact via a 3D printing friend for a Smooth-On distributor who hardly did any marketing on his own owing to the small market. Got the Smooth-On Moldstar 30 and the Smooth-Cast 356 for my needs. At an almost exorbitant price, might I add.
The polymer clay was easier to hunt down - we have a franchise for art supplies in Singapore (Art Friend) so I got two small packets of Sculpey Bake Shop. For the oven, I went on a second-hand product platform called Carousell where sellers could sell their unwanted stuff. I also managed to get my Lego parts from there.
Because $ynth was out of stock, I went with The Glyph's L2K adapter from Shapeways - shipping was immensely expensive so I decided to get 4 sets just to make it slightly more worth the money and effort.
First foray: Another reason
The keys of my laptop were terrible and that was one of the first reasons I went on to order a mechanical keeb.
Planning
The planning process was the fun part - understanding their parameters and shortcomings, and sourcing for them.
I also almost jumped the gun on a Kachakeys Brain Freeze but saw in the reseller's photos that the resin was a deeper shade of blue than I'd have liked. I was obsessed with the brain being encased in clear resin and planned several things around it, but it didn't materialize. It did make me think a lot about the entire process of keycap making though.
Master
Working with clay was a challenge. I deal with filmmaking equipment so my hands aren't the nimblest, especially when handling soft, malleable materials like clay. My first version was a simple enough face, this was simply the raw form before I went ahead to add details.
It was a Yeti-inspired design but it still felt flat, so I added a horn/party-hat of sorts to it. The details were tricky, and had a lot of run-off clay from the equipment I was using. A simple tip was to use a brush with rubbing alcohol to remove fingerprints and excess tiny bits of clay.
I fired it up in the oven and was pretty happy with the resulting baked master.
A very rough placement on my mac keyboard (of course these have chiclets and will not ever take the keycap that I was designing)
I also hit up a few other designs but unbeknownst to me, the keycap I was using as a blank was not 100% PBT, it was half and half, so things got a bit too hot for the blank I was using.
The other design was too complicated and I knew that the master mold would never survive the amount of detail in them so I didn't bother casting it.
The Glyph's silicone calculator came in really handy here:
http://artisanalliance.mx/tools/calculator/I also did a brain design (remember my obsession with Kachakey) but it didn't work out for me, the tiny spaces allowed bits of silicone to get stuck. My first butt also failed, as I couldn't find a needle thick enough to poke through the silicone to create sprue holes, so I had to cast another butt with old-school superglue and stick sprue method. There were bubbles and stuff and I forgot several things in the process of making the silicone mold (mold release etc).
First cast!
Bubbles in butt, but overall quite happy with it. The weird thing about making stuff is that once you start, you can't stop. I told myself that I'd wait to acquire a pressure pot before going on. But...
These guys kept spawning
Decided to attach them to the wall to have them available at a glance (cos keeb not here yet)
And for now, this is it!
On to more designs, whilst waiting for the pressure pot! (And also the mechanical keyboard itself
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