Weirdly enough, this is my first post, even though I have a stack of mechs I've been modding since March this year and I have been reading all the wealth of information you all shared -- seriously awesome stuff.
I started out like some of you, in a Best Buy glancing at the newest BlackWidow and asking a friend 'what's this hype about bloody mechanical keyboards?' and, of course, touching the keys and going like 'this isn't half bad'. Weeks later, took the plunge and made (terrible, in retrospect) decision of buying a BlackWidow Stealth, which was still SO GODDAMN BETTER than the ****ty rubber dome all my coworkers were using that is sinful. I started, naturally, stalking forums like this one and /r/mk (please, no rivalry) to learn all of you seemingly hate Razer. And I was like... you know what? A/B testing, let's buy a Ducky. I got the Shine 4 limited edition, Fire 69 (otherwise known as the switch sampler) and oh, dear, this is so much better (and so noisy, ugh... couldn't use it at work). Still, I like my BlackWidow, it started it all, so let's just change the switches to Cherry MX Clears, and maybe the keycaps for one of geek_feng's amazing PBT sets; remove those useless macros... I just wonder to what point I can still call it a BlackWidow
Barebones, no case BlackWidow with Clears (which I clearly ran out off in the last four keys)
My BlackWidow pre-PBT keycaps, with carbon fiber adhesives in the parts I'm prone to leave palm marks.
After that, I got a bunch of broken keyboards off Ebay to savage the parts.
Disassembled Model M, parts from a Rosewill (a frame and a terribly painted case) and a barebones Trigger, with keycaps in the blue box.
Hopefully will finish CNC'ing my first custom board shortly (a Phantom PCB; with a frame that didn't fit quite right, so I cut it with a Dremel; my BlackWidow's orange switches, which springs were too ****ty so I changed to 67g Cherry springs and they feel quite nice). Here are some pictures (and yes, I do plan to keep the cut PCB, I think it looks so rugged and industrial, like something that only needs a Half-Life lambda keycap -- which will hopefully appear on Massdrop eventually -- to be complete):
Spacebar texture is guntape on the standard ABS BW keycaps. Over the arrow keys is acrylic I glued with super glue to prevent spilling stuff directly on the PCB. I probably will have to put a layer of sheet acrylic under the frame to do the same thing for the bigger cuts.
Obvious in this picture -- keyboard is missing the stabilisers, which is due to this frame being from a keyboard which came with non standard stabilisers (which are smaller than the Costar I wanted to put as a replacement -- sigh, more machining).
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this "little" introduction; thanks for the posts that got me into this, you guys sure have an awesome community and I look forward to sharing an actual completed project very soon!
- royalsflush
