Hey all, I've been a mechanical keyboard fan for awhile but this is my first post at geekhack (I hope it is in the right spot)!
So I have a very specific reason for joining: I just picked up this Model M (
http://imgur.com/FgV7j0M ) with the intention of using it as a test bed to try out some ideas (I was going to try various kinds of paint on the keycaps and see how they hold up, at the end of the day they'd just be fodder for experimentation). I decided on this one because it had custom keycaps and I figured most people are only interested in buying Model M's in their natural gray-white-yellow state.... I figured killing this keyboard wouldn't matter as nobody would buy it...
Argh... now I'm having second thoughts...
For the last few hours I've had the board taken down and I'm ready to start spraying each of the keys... but to be honest, I've been very hesitant, mainly because so much care was put into the original owner in setting their own style. It's clear the user was a divorak typist, but I couldn't make out the story behind the keys. I'm a vi guy and I thought maybe this was some sort of emacs setup (the plus/eq and minus/dash in the middle of the board didn't make much sense to me).
So here's my question:
What should I do with this cap set? Is it a bad idea to destroy them or is it silly of me to be so hesitant? Should I just buy a cheap $20 blank set from unicomp to play with? Has anyone seen a cap set like this and can shed some light on the usage? At the end of the day it may not be important, it might just be for some highly specific terminal application used in the 90's, but I figured I would ask the most knowledgeable group that I could think of before erasing them.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
Cheers!
