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Making exotic wood artisan keycaps

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xiaoxuesheng:
cool

failKeys:
Soooo, Let's try this again.

Putting to the side the fact I can't sell for &(*^, I had 2 main issued making keycaps last time.

Issue 1 was simply holding them while cutting. Square was ok, but anything with a tapered side was kinda impossible. They would jiggle and move no matter how i clamped them. It was also a big issue to basically make them one at a time.

Issue 2 was the stem. Well, not the stem specifically, but installing it square and level on every keycap.

Sooo, to mitigate almost all those issues, I have made a fixture plate. It can hold a 60% keycap set, plus 10 additional 1u caps. It can take any scrap of wood large enough for a single cap. It can work with any profile up to 12mm height. The bottoms and stems are done in one shot, so all stems will be precisely aligned and offset on every cap, securely glued in.




Last on the list was surface finish. I realllly wanted to basically eliminate sanding and i have managed here. Sanding with 1000 grit would make the finish rougher, which is something i can deal with :) The bottoms after being removed form the fixture will need a tiny swipe on the sandpaper but otherwise, these come off the fixture "finished" and ready for oil.

Now we need to move on to the first real set! Eek! I think it will be padauk and ebony, cause that's the scraps I have on hand.

failKeys:
One single pink ivory "W" keycap.











The ASD sadly were botches because of a program mistake. But everything is working, so we can move on.





The rest have to wait as a broke my last inlay cutter and it takes 2 weeks for more to arrive. :/



The finished padauk set will look like this:

Pyre:
That space bar looks pretty neat - do you do other inlay colours, or just the blue + and you ship to aus?

failKeys:
I can do anything really, but I am trying to make some predetermined sets to keep things organised. This inlay set is called "circuit cat" (the 8 playstation ones are spares) and as long as the colours stay 1 for 1, you can have any woods and any colours. You could just go full custom weirdness too but the price will get out of hand fast cause your basically paying me buy the hour at that point to reprogram everything. I will add other inlay patterns as I move along.

I can ship to aus. Will cost a lot, but so do the caps sooo :P

This round (for the moment) I am only doing full plates which is a 60% set, plus 10 extra caps. I am not yet sure how that will work sales wise. I learned my lesson last time that making first then trying to sell second is just not going to work. If people want to split a plate though, that can work. Someone takes the spares, someone the aplha numerics, someone the command caps, etc. Then I just divide the bill and ship separately. Ha, just had the thought of a web page that you just click and preorder the caps on the plate you want, and when they are all spoken for, I make them. Hmmm, I wonder how hard that is for me to code up.

As a reference (subject to change cause everything always is:

- a plate of blanks will be about $1000cdn (750usd)
- every stage of inlay adds $500cdn (375usd)

The one in the renders is 3 inlay stages. even though it technically has 7 colours. So it would be $2500.

Some wood will raise the price as well, but in most cases the wood price is insignificant vs the labour. Pink ivory is one exception, that stuff is about $3 per cap so full pink ivory would be about $200-$250cdn extra. Snakewood would be about $500cdn extra. I can also do corian in the mix. I can do aluminium brass and copper as well, but not in the same plate as wood cause they need coolant to cut.

 I'd like to do 1 to 4 plates a month, but I have no idea if there's enough customers. It has all dropped off a cliff now by the look of things. The mech reddit sub has just died off almost completely the last few months. Not quite sure what has motivated that - maybe its just reddit being reddit but I really don't know how to market things anyway haha.

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