Production update: 

The factory expects to complete all or almost all B104 before the Chinese New Year (mid-Feb.).  Before they leave they will load what they have completed onto a container shipment, so the B104's can start going out to everyone in early April if all goes well. 

The inner assembly plates were previously completed for all B104.  Just the cases and final assembly are remaining.  About 100 B104 keyboards were fully assembled as noted before, and an additional 100+ completed inner assemblies are waiting to be dropped into the cases when the next batch of cases are done.  You can see an earlier batch of completed B104 cases in the mini factory tour video in a recent post.

After they return in March, they will start working on the B122 cases.  After that, they plan to work on the B62 and BSSK cases; both B62 and BSSK are confirmed ready to proceed and they are making one more B122 pre-production sample to make sure all the tooling is correctly set up and the pieces are properly positioned after assembly.  And while they work on the cases, other workers are finishing up all the top and bottom inner assembly plates which need to be laser cut, bent to shape (top inner assemblies only of course, since the bottoms are just flat plates), and plated (bottom) or powdercoated (top).

The other keyboard parts were all completed (modules, PCBs, controllers, keycaps, etc.) so they just need to work on the cases and plates and then finish up assembly.  Based on the current rate of progress, they expect to complete the remaining 3 keyboard models in the two months after they return from break.  Their main bottlenecks are the laser cutting machines (they can only cut one per machine at one time) and the custom-tooled case bending machine (only one case can be bent at a time); see prior videos to see the Model F laser cutting (similar process) and beam spring case bending.

Now that all of the issues have been worked out (see prior posts for details), they are finally able to concentrate on finishing production and assembly.

If you get work done faster, but there is limited demand for work, you will need less workers.
One artist can do the work of what 10 have done in the past, the other 9 need food-stamps...

PC very nice

very exciting, i do wish just two more keys were added to the base set to allow for a fully grey 60%, could look very sharp

i can do that

Based on the photos of the original, I bet Signature Plastics was the keycap manufacturer. Although the switches aren't MX, it looks like uniform-profile R3 SA. If so, they might have the tooling for original-legend function keys.

Show Image

hmm, interesting thanks for pointing that out. i will look into that.

Big fan of SA.  The inspiration board looks like the alphas are almost white.  I think they just look gray from the lighting.  Because I already have quite a few SA sets with a gray similar to this, I would be more interested in a lighter shade like GVA, if not just white WFG, WGE

something to make it look like an aged white, not gray

i feel that the colors are close to original, at least from the images i saw. i suspect that it's the lighting, but i will check again.


On another topics, happy holiday everyone. :D