This is the result of my cry for help posted mid-November this year at http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Island:7711.
Finally the project is nearing completion, with my brothers getting their hands on the keyboards on Christmas eve
I wrote a post in the thread linked about about how things turned out so far, but I figured it would probably get more exposure if I write it up as a completed project article, so here goes!The projectI bought 2 keyboards for my 2 younger brothers for christmas, and my dad is a professional car painter. I put them together and we've made some custom colored keyboards for them both.
A full (so far) set of images of the project can be found at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vhaarr/sets/72157622921208869/ProcessUpdate: More detailed process explained at http://geekhack.org/showpost.php?p=144691&postcount=7First we cleaned all the keys with alcohol and let them dry out.
Then we applied one layer of paint primer with a spray gun. This was supposed to eat into the plastic slightly so that the paint would later stick to it.
While this was drying we mixed up the colors we were going to use (dark green, light green, dark blue and light blue). All the colors were mixed by my dad after I helped select a few (pictures of the color selectors in the flickr set). All colors were professional-level quality
http://www.glasurit.com/ products made for painting cars.
When the paint sticker was dry (5 minutes), we sprayed one base color (the dark one) on a whole set of keys and let that dry (10 minutes), then we sprayed another coat of dark on all the keys (you could see that after one coating the edges of the top of the keys were still black through the paint, sadly I did not take a picture of this). Before the 2nd coating of dark color had been allowed to set, we went around the table at an angle and sprayed with the light color to create a gradient effect.
After the paint had dried (15 minutes at 80 degrees celsius), we removed the keys from the spraying room and let them dry in normal household temperature for another few hours.
If we had not done this last step of drying AND pressed down hard on the keys (which had to be done, to attach them to the keyboards), we would've left imprints on them. Even with plastic gloves, they would've gotten noticable markings.
After letting them dry up for a few hours we removed them from the tape holding them in place on the tables and inserted them on the keyboards.
Questions?If you have any questions about the project, I will be happy to answer anything.
If you are interested in doing a project such as this for yourself, the local car painting shop will be more than qualified to do all aspects of the work. It really does take less than 1 hour to do _everything_ in a proper shop if you don't count the time it takes to dry (during which, obviously, you don't have to do anything except sit and wait).
Thanks for the help I got in the other thread before I started the project!
After christmas we are going to paint a few more sets of keys I think, so that my brothers can experiment a bit with different color combinations and so forth. I might post pictures of that as well if anyone requests it.