Painting Keycaps Entirely Black (e.g., "Otaku")

[cupraikso]

I exhaustively searched Geekhack for information about painting keycaps, and I only found information about dyeing them (to change the color without hiding the legends) and painting them with vinyl or car paints.

There surely must be something more practical if one only wants to paint the keys AND hide the legends. I'm looking for matte black paint.

How about using something like plastic model paint (e.g., Testors) that can be found in any hobby store? does it need any primers?

or maybe nail polish?

[mkawa]

just buy blank keys dude.

[fossala]

If you dye keycaps black you cannot see the legends because they are also black. Be careful if you are using abs keycaps as the melting point is lower.

[emptythecache]

abs: http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/keycap-sets.html

these are engraved, not blank, but apparently blank black pbts are hard to find? that's weird. http://www.vendio.com/stores/E-sports-Gaming-equipments/item/pbt-key-caps/104-pbt-black-engraved-key-cap/lid=18974433

oh wait, there's a group buy for them: http://geekhack.org/showthread.php?28953-Order-Thread-Eventually!-KBC-104-PBT-Blank-Black-Keyset! Apparently they didn't even exist before. And I know it says "Eventually!" but you will probably get them before we get our Round 4 doubleshots. Feng is good at running group buys.

[cupraikso]

just buy blank keys dude.

Oops, I forgot to mention that this is for a Kinesis keyboard, and sourcing blank key caps that fit is not possible.

[mkawa]

are you sure? have you consulted with input nirvana? he seems to be the kinese expert around here.

assuming that's true, vinyl or car paints would definitely be your best bet. i haven't tried rit dye, but it seems to be pretty finicky.

you might first try the most innocuous thing you can think of, to allow for increasingly desperate measures later (lol). for example, you could start with just using a sharpie to write over the legends. if that doesn't look reasonable, you can always dye or paint over the pen marks. i would try a few methods with some laser infilled keycaps from a rubber dome board you don't care about first too.

[tp4tissue]

abs: http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/keycap-sets.html

these are engraved, not blank, but apparently blank black pbts are hard to find? that's weird. http://www.vendio.com/stores/E-sports-Gaming-equipments/item/pbt-key-caps/104-pbt-black-engraved-key-cap/lid=18974433

oh wait, there's a group buy for them: http://geekhack.org/showthread.php?28953-Order-Thread-Eventually!-KBC-104-PBT-Blank-Black-Keyset! Apparently they didn't even exist before. And I know it says "Eventually!" but you will probably get them before we get our Round 4 doubleshots. Feng is good at running group buys.

A blank set of black caps of any material will have severe shine down the line.. because it's black, the shine surface will be very obvious, vs say white.

It's not that shine will occur more/lesss,, it is the fact that on Blank black caps, there's nothing catching your attention except the shine..

[LDX]

hey I got a challenge for you

I got a reclusa, and for personal reasons i dont wanna get rid of it

Reclusa has no spare parts and keycaps are not compatible with any other keyboard.
it is a backlit keyboard but my keys are lossing its color

any solution?

[Omerta]

I was actually going to start a topic about painting my Topre caps but figured i'd just post in here as well.

I have an otaku HHKP2 with a non-printed red ESC. I bought the red WSAD with side printed arrows from them and it just doesn't look right with my WSAD having the only letters on my board. I figured that i could just find a way to paint off the WSAD but haven't had the time to ask an opinion on it. Dying won't work of course. So there has to be another way or option for me just to remove the WSAD lettering.