geekhack Community > Keyboard Keycaps

gluing jig for keycaps?

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N8N:
So I've got piles of Cherry doubleshots, but it seems like all the "good" keyboards that use MX switches are all slightly but not really incompatible...

I was thinking, if I took some MY switch guts of which I have plenty and could really not care less whether they are ever used again to actually type anything, could I epoxy (or is there a more appropriate adhesive?) the stems to a board or piece of thick rigid plastic and make myself a jig to facilitate bastardizing the MY bottom row caps to work on an MX board, and/or mod a Cherry space bar to work on a Filco/Das/whatever board or vice versa?  Has this been done before and am I reinventing the wheel?

What would you guys use to glue pieces of two keycaps together?  I know the Cherry laser ones are PBT, apparently the doubleshots are ABS (going off wiki, not molded into the underside like the laser ones) and so are the caps on the shiny new WASD board that I just got (although the only gluing that I could see myself doing on that would be to add an extra post to the space bar to make it Cherry compatible...  but the WASD seems nicer so far than any Cherry board.)

Can I use the posts from old Cherry PBT keys and glue them to the ABS doubleshots?  or would I be better off sourcing some more ABS keys to hack up?  What glue works best, for those who have done this before?  I was thinking possibly something like JB Weld or PC-7 (e.g. thick 2-part epoxies) would that work well?

My idea was to basically have something set up so that if, say, I wanted to add a post to a space bar, I would already have all four stems where they needed to be, take a post from a hacked up cap, push it on the stem corresponding to the post that I needed to add, then press the space bar onto the other three stems after putting a dab of epoxy in the appropriate space.  then I'd have to figure out how to locate the other keys so that the post would be perfectly centered but the good news is that there'd only be two sizes of keys to make a jig for (caps lock and then all the keys on the bottom row.

thoughts?

jpm804:
Might want to look at ripster's mod for some of the pimpmykeyboard keycaps.

http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Island:9617&highlight=pimpmykeyboard

N8N:
ah, I'd found the wiki on doubleshotting a Filco but not that one.  That seems to be pretty much what I was thinking jig-wise.

Ripster, if you're reading this, how have your keys held up?

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