Vescovo Keyboard

[Vescovo Alessio]

Hello everyone, about one year ago I had the idea of designing a new layout for writing in Italian inspired from the QZERTY of the typewriters (my primary job is the typewriter restoration). After a year, thanks also to this forum, I was able to give life to my project. I never thought I'd make a product like this, but step by step it was born. This topic wants to be an inspiration for artisans like me who have a great desire to do. I will share the various steps, remember that many designs are patented, but you can take inspiration from the processes.

The question I asked myself is, why aren't there high-level handcrafted keyboards? Please remove incommentable examples like Datamancer Seafarer (I laughed one week when I saw the Phillips screws on an antique-inspired keyboard); or keyboards that cost a lot just because they're made of gold. Perhaps the only noteworthy example is the Japanese HHKB in wajima-lacquered, which I haven't figured out if it's usable, I have not seen any letter on the keycaps, perhaps it's merely an expository object? Sympathetically, the second attempt seems mine, Italian; it is known that Japan and Italy are two similar nations in terms of the millenary culture of craftsmanship.

An artisan company behind my house sells worldwide custom fountain pens, one of their pens was sold at an auction in Shanghai (China) for 6.3 million euros. Is a mechanical keyboard perhaps a less valuable writing instrument? I don't believe it! So dear craftsman friend on the other side of the world, I hope you will find inspiration from my adventure, that in the future you too can create something unique and really well done.

Alessio Vescovo - Vescovo Restauri.

[Vescovo Alessio]

Finding the right PCB design and modifying it as you need.

The first step was to search for the PCB I wanted: ISO 105. I searched a lot and the only starting point I found was the GH80-3000 project by the user TalkingTree.

https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=92962

More than an ISO105 this project is an "universal", so I had some Rev.2 built, the version with RGB led. Unfortunately I found many difficulties: some keys had to be manually wired so they didn't conflict with each other, furthermore there weren't the related files to work on QMK. So I learned how to "play" with EasyEda, find those conflicts and wired to solve. Then I did the programming on QMK and this was much more difficult for me. However after a long labors I managed to have a working matrix that can be modified at will quite easily. Everything worked! I posted on the releted topic of GH80-3000 my efforts.

Understood the rules of the game, then I redesigned the TalkingTree PCB, making it a pure ISO 105: removing key-slots that I didn't need, enlarging the multilayer for a perimetral screw connection, renumbering the remaining keys and fixing other small errors I had found (position S104... ). I placed a hole mask on the right that allows you to wire 6 more keys, in case someone wants to insert 6 more functions to the right of the numpad. This new PCB was designed from a CC-BY SA 3.0 OpenSource project and so as related contract rules, is here re-shared with the same OpenSource contract. I think it could be a useful basis for others who want an ISO105 PCB: it's not difficult on EasyEda to change the perimeter and connection points adapting to the case you dream of. Only remember to "regenerate copper zones" when you finish editing. For obvious reasons, the shared version does not contain my corporate branding and the legal CE and Raee markings.

https://oshwlab.com/alessiovescovo/vnqzerty-1_iso105_copy

[Vescovo Alessio]

Ideas on sonority and realization of the wooden frame.

The acoustic idea behind this keyboard is similar to planar speakers: a wooden frame with a membrane fixed on the inside perimeter that sounds... great !!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnepan. So, when you press a key, it will have a different sound based on its position on the membrane. The PCB must be strong to avoid breakage as there is no inferior support, and also has many connection screws on the perimeter, in my case 17 brass screws. Brass screws are still used on prestigious furniture. These screws guarantee not to make the oxide veil in contact with the wood which would block them. With brass screws you are sure that in 100 or 200 or 1000 years you will be able to unscrew the screws from the wood to do maintenance on the keyboard. Even stainless steel has the same result, but tastes less like antique. It can be an option to give a more modern aesthetic.



The construction of the wood frame has been carefully researched. The choice of not do from a single wood piece but from 4 pieces interlocked with the traditional "tenon mortise" method was taken after talking to a famous luthier in my country: "A violin cannot be made from solid, but it’s a jointed and glued of several pieces". This is because wood is a living material. Parts that have precision machining such as mechanical keyboards must be made in several joined pieces, otherwise it risk bending and even cracking over the years. I see that all the wooden keyboards on the market at the moment (apart from mine) are made from one piece, so… will the sellers of those keyboards or the violin maker be more right? We will see in next 5 or 10 years if this keyboards made from one piece of wood will be bent/cracked or still perfect.




The wood finish of the keyboard is done with natural shellac applied with the pad. It is the same process that Stradivari used in the 1600s on his famous violins. It consists of three phases that I don't think you are interested in explaining in detail now. The complete process takes many hours, but the result is unmatched by any modern paint.

[Vescovo Alessio]

Speaking of the keyboard sound: a friend lent me a good microphone to record a video test with. There would be much more to tell especially about my homemade method of making double shot keycaps. But before I continue to tell the story, I'd like to hear your opinions on the sound and the project. The switches welded into this model are Gateron Oil King and I like them, but then I'll assemble what the customer prefer since it's a customizable product.

[qeebored]

I love your project, especially the traditional craftmanship and the connection to musical instruments.

I would love to hear a typing sample with clicky switches, such as Kailh Box Jades, Box Pinks, or Zeal Clickiez. These adds much of the missing richness of the timbre that I find lacking in the contemporary "thocky" keyboard sound fashion.

The keycaps looks unique and interesting, but I find that they do distract the attention away from the vintage feeling of the rest of the keyboard. I suspect that this is something you can fine-tune when you perfect the molding process, either by colours, or design. My personal preferences are sculpted keycaps, where each row has an angle on the keycap tops which align better with the finger movements, and a spherical top that directs the fingers toward the middle of the keycap during typing.

[PlayBox]

pretty cool

[Vescovo Alessio]

Dear Qeebored, thanks for the reply. I understand what you are saying, the mechanical keyboards that are so popular here have a close link with typewriters. If you were a typewriter collector, then your favorite would be the IBM Selectric mod 1. It was the first typewriter to feature the kind of keycap you like, still used today. If you're curious, you can see a full restored model here: https://www.vescovorestauri.it/restauri/ibm-selectric-i/

I was looking for nice Clickys. Zeal Clickiez looks like 5 pins but I don't understand their trip, is it 4 mm? I could do some testing. The others that you proposed can't fit for their protruding outline around the attachment cross. My keycaps have a robust connection that occupies the entire rectangular support space of the shaft of the switch.

[qeebored]

I love your typewriter site, thanks for the link. I can't read Italian, but google translate helped a lot. While browsing your site, I also noticed the homing key design with the three metal rods for bumps. A very nice touch.

As you already figured out, I have been exposed to more relatively modern, electric typewriters than to older ones. The Selectric is among my favorites together with the beautiful Olivettis of the era.

The Clickiez have a 4 mm trip, the same as Cherry MX and most clones. Two of the pins on five-pin switches are just plastic material to help with positioning and stability on plateless designs, and can be cut off for use with pcbs that have three holes. I understand the challenge with the extra material on the stem on the Box switches, though. 

Do you plan on creating other keyboard types? I would love to see your take on a 40% ortho or column-staggered keyboard.

[Vescovo Alessio]

Dear Qeebored, I'm glad you enjoyed my website. My clients and I are typewriter enthusiasts, so it makes no sense to create an ortholinear or other unusual arrangement. But I tell you that in the future I dream of creating a 50% "stepped keyboard" that faithfully replicates the effect of a classic typewriter (each row of keys will be higher than the previous one). But I think it will be a few years before the next one, because at the moment I have too much work with restorations and I don't have time to dedicate to new projects. Also first I'd like to see how the market responds with this first product.

[ander]

Man—I'm not usually susceptible to the ASMR thing, but the moment you started typing on this, I got that tingly feeling. What a sound!

Just one thing: Aren't legends this big and bold usually for people with vision impairments? That's what I thought, anyway. There's nothing wrong with big retro characters, but personally, I think I'd skip the bolding and just use a regular style... Sometimes "less is more".

[Vescovo Alessio]

Dear Ander, I'm glad you liked its sound! As for the large legends, I am bound to make them like this due to the artisanal process I use for producing keycaps. Even ancient typewriters are made with a similar process, when they had not yet invented the complex double shot, and the keys were still made with semi-industrial processes. Look at this IBM for example: they printed the keycap with a housing of the shape of the letter, which was then filled with a hardening paste of the desired color. Instead of filling with the paste, I fill with ABS resin and then polymerize with a UV lamp: different materials but the concept behind the process is the same.



Production. Let's see in detail how I build these handcrafted “double shot" keycaps, which I mount on my keyboards. The unique and patented design resembles an hourglass (or a woman's belly ) and is designed to reduce the possibility of interfering with nearby keys and at the same time giving a unique and inimitable aesthetic. I start from a 3D print in ABS resin that has a hollow two millimeters deep, exactly "the negative" of the writing. This cavity is then filled with black resin by manual injection with a syringe. The liquid resin is then polymerized with a UV lamp; the key is then taken to the lathe and defaced, removing the excess resin and effectively making the writing appear. This process takes on average 6 minutes for each key, considering that a keyboard has 105 keys the time needed to create a complete set is approximately 10 hours. The main problem of wanting to inject resin on small legends is that some air bubbles could remain trapped which make the work imperfect. I did many tests to try to remove them: even putting them in a vacuum bell before polymerizing, but it's not easy. So finally I opted for large legends, which guarantees better results and a more vintage look like these very old typewriters. The keycaps are finally tumbled with a tumbling machine to remove small imperfections of the print layers and give it a "real touch" sensation when you caress them.






Fine finishes. The tactile references are made in stainless steel pins, they are produced with a watchmaking lathe and then recessed onto the "F,J,5" keys. Silicone rubber O-ring is then mounted to soften the end of the key stroke. Finally for the large keycaps there is a felt filling to improve the sound. The space bar in particular, already 80% full of resin, is filled with another 10% with felt. I noticed that even on very expensive keyboards the space bar has an embarrassing sound and mine initially had it too. I said to myself: there's no way one of the most expensive keyboards in the world could sound like this, so I tried many solutions and this is the best of all the ones I've tried.





I hope you can take inspiration from this process to make excellent handcrafted keycaps at home too!

P.S. Last week I sold the first keyboard to an Italian writer: the N° 23003. She wanted Italian National Walnut, black anodized aluminium insert, MacOS version. Curiously of ten switches I showed her, she chose Cherry MX Brown.

[Vescovo Alessio]

Dear friends, last week I completed the construction of the N°23003 the first Vescovo keyboard sold. Italian writer who bought it had to be patient for two months, but once received she was very happy!

I share here some photos taken by the photographer. Look at the beauty of the Italian Walnut: each tree is unique and passing through the hands of a good carpenter can create products with extraordinary colors and grains, for this reason throughout the Renaissance and even then it was considered the most valuable wood in the world. In modern times it has been discarded by the industry, because the industry needs "standards". If I build 10 oak keyboards they will all tend to be very similar and are the same for many other woods, instead if I build 10 Italian Walnut keyboards they will all be very different.

As I was saying, since it is a wood not used by industry it is difficult to find. The tree used to build this keyboard was cut by a farmer about 6 years ago on the Euganean Hills, then carefully seasoned. Maybe some of you may have seen the hills where this tree grew: on sunny days you can see them very well from the bell tower of San Marco, in Venice. This tree perhaps thanks to the volcanic soil, has grown in a particular way: appears two-tone, black veined and with micro-moire (in Italian "marezzature" I don't know if "moire" is the exact translation). The shellac finish gives it a shine unmatched by any synthetic paint in the world. It exalt the moire giving tham optical effect: they appear and disappear sometimes they also change direction, changing the observation point.

[ylothar]

Bravo!!!

[Vescovo Alessio]

A high-quality keyboard must have a high-quality suitcase. Unfortunately this is not always true, I have seen many videos of embarrassing unboxings of really expensive keyboards. Producers usually use suitcases in which you can cut out the padding, or other types of commercial solutions. They often stop the keyboard inside the case with plastic padding or worse: pluriballs. The unboxing video of the $3500 Tfue keyboard (which is about the price of a Vescovo keyboard) made me think a lot. Does it seem acceptable that when he opens the case the first thing that is found is a plastic padding as in a television or in a vacuum cleaner unboxing? It's crazy! So maybe customers are losing the culture of the well made luxury, which in the past had very specific rules. Today it seems that "luxury" is only because it is expensive.

I don't agree with this trend. My luck is that I've been working on antique typewriters for more than 10 years, which were very expensive and well made products, in this way I learned how a luxury mechanical product should be made, and also its suitcase. So I made it to the highest quality that was possible, creating the handcrafted suitcase which you can see in the photos below, according to the classic concept of suitcases used for musical instruments and typewriters.

I'm pretty sure that no mechanical keyboard in the world has ever had such a prestigious handcrafted suitcase.





Positioning security is held by felts, which the two of the top press down the keyboard (2mm) when closing the suitcase. This closure is carried out with two stainless steel butterfly mechanisms. The special corners are each fixed with three small shoe blue steel nails, the 4 rear corner integrate 4 aluminum feet which allow the suitcase to be vertically supported. The horizontal support on the table (opening position) it is entrusted to 4 round felts. The Vescovo logo is laser engraved, the finish of the wood is done first with oil and then a few coats of natural shellac pad applied. The keyboard is perfectly protected by this suitcase and nothing more is needed: when the customer unboxes, it will find the keyboard in all its beauty in front of them.

[mohawk1367]

italians when something isnt luxurious enough:

[tricheboars]

this was such a fun read. thank you for sharing.