So in a recent Massdrop I finally took the plunge and bought a keyboard I have wanted in my collection for a long time, a KBC Poker II.
The particular variant going was a white one with MX Clear switches which isn't really to my liking, but the time was right, the price was right so I bought it anyway. It arrived this week and as soon as I picked it up yesterday I set about modding it. Instead of buying new key caps right away I decided to try an experiment instead. So I ran out and bought 2 cans of Plasti-Dip. One in red for the keycaps and one in anthracite for the case. I have been wanting to try Plasti-Dip on something for a while and figured this was a good enough excuse to do it.
So I set about pulling the keyboard apart and used double sided tape to stick the keys down on some cardboard. I also tried this with the case, but realised I would be missing the top lip of the case that way so I made a little X bipod out of cardboard to suspend it up in the air a bit so I could spray all the surfaces needed (Not pictured, sorry). I made sure to put some tape over the threaded screw holes inside the case however so that they didn't get all filled up.
For my thoughts and observations on the process. I am very happy with how the colours of the keyboard came out now that it's all together, but as you can see in some of the last pictures, the edges on the bottoms of the keycaps isn't all that great after being pulled from the cardboard. In the future I would get a bunch of switch stems and glue them to a wooden board to allow the bottom edges of the keycaps to remain suspended in the air, I would also space them out more so it's easier to get the needed coverage per keycap without adjacent ones blocking the spray.
Another thing I was really curious about was how Plasti-Dip would feel on the keycaps while typing. It has a sort of rubbery feeling that is quite grippy, very different to plain keycaps. Also, with all this Plasti-Dip on them the keycaps are really quiet now, they almost seem to reduce the sound of the rebound on the key after hitting it, one of the shortcomings of O-rings. I have a couple of sample O-rings in a box somewhere, I might have to get them out and see how it sounds with reduced compression and rebound noise.
Future Plans - I would like to do either Ergo Clear modded switches or convert them to blues. I'm also probably going to pick up a low profile aluminium case for it.
