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This year I have decided to do a series of different keyboards builds involving different methods of finishing metal. After this one they will all be custom made by myself from the ground up including the design and manufacture of the PCB, case and plate.
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Here is what the keyboard looked like before with paint
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And after the original sanding, this wasn't how I finished it. I finished it with a single direction sand at 60 grit to get a brushed effect.
The first of which is a modification to a Noppoo Lolita plate made out of iron. What I originally wanted to do was to give it a tiger like look by heating bronzing the steel to a gold colour with a propane torch and then etching stripes into the steel with hydrochloric acid.
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I updated with the new pictures of the plate. I was going to burnish it but instead I gave it a brushed finish before heat treatment and a final clear coat to prevent rust. It turned out significantly better than the original.
Old Plate
More
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While I was bronzing the steel it went a little blue, and as the rest of the steel was a gold colour that I didn't really like I decided to go with the blue colour as it looked significantly better. I didn't clean the plate well enough so there were imperfections. It was also quite hard to capture the colour as it changes depending on the angle I was taking the photograph from.
Next I applied a pattern of a tiger stripe using nail polish and some paper. Today I attempted the etch and unfortunately it didn't go as planned because the plate is iron not steel, so instead of etching it just cleaned the blue off of it resulting in its natural silver colour. I decided to remove the excess nail polish from the plate with acetone and clean it all the way back with the remaining hydrocloric acid and tonight I will reblue it (much cleaner this time) and then give it a final coat of clear to protect it from rust.
I have plenty more photos but unfortunately my internet is quite terrible so I cannot upload them at this time, but when it becomes available I will upload them.
For my next project I will be replicating the KMAC mini layout metal sandwich case.
The PCB will have options for many variations of bottom row layouts, ISO compatibility, SMD or DIP LED's (there will be two solder points for either one) with the option of using bipolar led's if you feel you want to put those in there, as well as the option for bottom mounted LED if you want to add a diffuser plate. I will be writing custom firmware for the entire thing and releasing all the design documents as open source so if you want to go a head and have one fabricated yourself you can do so. I will have 3 to 4 PCB's up for grabs after the project has been finished (this will be in a few months). If there is enough interest I could also run a group buy after the build is finished for the entire kit.
For an idea of my future keyboards here is a list.
The Metallic Trilogy
-Part Two: The Punk
--Hammered metal and blue bronzed top plate (the blue was meant for this keyboard but I will see how well I finish the Noppoo plate tonight)
--Graphitied Underside
--Diffuser plate
--KMAC Layout
-Part Three: Emperor of Rome
--Copper plater with finish (finish is top secret but it will look nice)
--Aluminium case
--Underside is TBD
--RS96 layout
Hotline
-Acylic Case
-Poppy Colours
-Artwork TBD
-Layout TBD
Retro (GMK Snes Inspired)
-Everything is TBD I don't know if I am going to do this one yet