Hi! I'm excited to convert from lurker to participant.
.backstoryI came across geekhack a few weeks ago after becoming frustrated with my das keyboard and razer BlackWidow TE silent. The das was my first mechanical keyboard and like many other posts I've read, it was definitely a bit of a gateway for me. It felt better, sounded better, and typed better than any previous board I'd owned. It kept me going strong at home while I used the Microsoft ergo split keyboard at work. That changed when razer had their big sale a few months back and I picked up the blackwidow for $40. It was my first tenkeyless board and I immediately loved the format: more desk space, much more comfortable mouse use during programming and gaming. However. The board drops keys like nothing I've ever used before and my bad habit of bottoming out my keys on both the das and widow led to some days ending in sore pinkies. These heavy finger falls also drove one of my coworkers to throwing some red bands my way to help dampen the machine gun fire. The immediate improvement in comfort is ultimately what led me here in my quest for more knowledge on what I could do...
.currentAfter much reading and playing around with a switch tester, I decided that I really wanted to build my own board. I'm a bit of a habitual maker so learning that it was even a possibility was a serious spark for me. I quickly set about studying other peoples custom board layouts and ended up basing mine off of some of matt3o's earlier builds and the hhkb. After settling on the design I found a link to the whitefox info and learned that my design was almost an exact match to one of the configurations, go figure I missed it but I feel lucky as now I get to build mine from scratch
At this point I'm just waiting on the last of the parts to arrive with the long pole most likely being the plates from bigbluesaw. I really want to thank everyone here who has come before and shared their knowledge; it made designing, iterating, and ordering really smooth. The best was the discussions around placements and spacing, it probably saved me from making some noob mistakes. This board is going to become my new home kb until I build my next one in the
.future.
Specs:
Because I like giving embarrassing names to my projects I've called the current build "Death's Dulch" as it will be my gaming board. In traditional maker fashion there a bunch of things about the board that I already know I want to improve on. I want to learn how to anodize aluminum so I can better color match the case, I need to setup a drill press so I can bevel the screw holes for flush mount fasteners, and I want to add a small usb hub to the back for charging my mouse and for attaching a matching external numpad.
One of the things I did not account for well was sourcing the multimedia keys. I found (and blindly ordered) the multimedia key pack from WASD without realizing that they would be such a poor match next to the SP caps
Until I find a replacement I'm using the icon cursor keys for the media keys and the text cursor keys for the cursor. If anyone knows where I might find some sweet sweet SP DSA multimedia keys please let me know.
I will definitely post build pictures when everything arrives.
Finally, I ordered a black hhkb for work to replace the razer for now and to provide me with a good travel keyboard. Explaining to airport security that it is totally okay to take a large das on the airplane gets tiring after a while and doing it with an aluminum bodied custom seems right out.
.futureThe future is what forced me to stop being a lurker. I've been browsing to keep learning but also to keep an eye out for The Set. What is the The Set? I didn't know until I found
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=76080.0 and learned that The Set was in design by you fabulous folks. I'm a consummate Star Wars fan and the idea of building a board with those caps is just too much. So I joined up so I can help advocate for and keep track of The Set. It'll ultimately be used to build my new work keyboard and will be a much longer endeavor.
Aaaaaanyways. That was a really long intro. I'm excited to be here and to hopefully help advance the world of keyboard building in some way.
Cheers!
