Dear Ander, I'm glad you liked its sound! As for the large legends, I am bound to make them like this due to the artisanal process I use for producing keycaps. Even ancient typewriters are made with a similar process, when they had not yet invented the complex double shot, and the keys were still made with semi-industrial processes. Look at this IBM for example: they printed the keycap with a housing of the shape of the letter, which was then filled with a hardening paste of the desired color. Instead of filling with the paste, I fill with ABS resin and then polymerize with a UV lamp: different materials but the concept behind the process is the same.
Production. Let's see in detail how I build these handcrafted “double shot" keycaps, which I mount on my keyboards. The unique and patented design resembles an hourglass (or a woman's belly
) and is designed to reduce the possibility of interfering with nearby keys and at the same time giving a unique and inimitable aesthetic. I start from a 3D print in ABS resin that has a hollow two millimeters deep, exactly "the negative" of the writing. This cavity is then filled with black resin by manual injection with a syringe. The liquid resin is then polymerized with a UV lamp; the key is then taken to the lathe and defaced, removing the excess resin and effectively making the writing appear. This process takes on average 6 minutes for each key, considering that a keyboard has 105 keys the time needed to create a complete set is approximately 10 hours. The main problem of wanting to inject resin on small legends is that some air bubbles could remain trapped which make the work imperfect. I did many tests to try to remove them: even putting them in a vacuum bell before polymerizing, but it's not easy. So finally I opted for large legends, which guarantees better results and a more vintage look like these very old typewriters. The keycaps are finally tumbled with a tumbling machine to remove small imperfections of the print layers and give it a "real touch" sensation when you caress them.
Fine finishes. The tactile references are made in stainless steel pins, they are produced with a watchmaking lathe and then recessed onto the "F,J,5" keys. Silicone rubber O-ring is then mounted to soften the end of the key stroke. Finally for the large keycaps there is a felt filling to improve the sound. The space bar in particular, already 80% full of resin, is filled with another 10% with felt. I noticed that even on very expensive keyboards the space bar has an embarrassing sound and mine initially had it too. I said to myself: there's no way one of the most expensive keyboards in the world could sound like this, so I tried many solutions and this is the best of all the ones I've tried.
I hope you can take inspiration from this process to make excellent handcrafted keycaps at home too!
P.S. Last week I sold the first keyboard to an Italian writer: the N° 23003. She wanted Italian National Walnut, black anodized aluminium insert, MacOS version. Curiously of ten switches I showed her, she chose Cherry MX Brown.