I recently bought a Topre Type Heaven off craigslist for $50. And before I get a bunch of grief; NO, I'm not lying and NO, it isn't stolen this time!
)
) My plan was to use it for work but I was constantly worrying about the noise of the sliders slapping the frame on the upstroke. I have no idea if it was actually bothering Frank in the cubicle next to me, but the thought of thew possibility was making me anxious. I read about some ways to silence Topre keys and I decided on o2dazone's
method of using ****ty
Harbor Freight hollow punches to make custom o-rings/landing pads. Only instead of buying silicone sheet, I walked around the shop at work with some calipers looking for something around 15 to 20 mils thick. I ended up finding some roofing tar paper (~17 mils) that we use to mask the floors during messy projects. (For anyone thinking of doing this in a non-****ty way but while still saving some cash, I found
this to be the cheapest rubber. It's 40a durometer gum rubber sheet, 20 mils.)
On to the build! Here is the
imgur album formatted build if you prefer that.
Cutting the O-Rings: The dimensions I used are: 1/2" OD, 3/8" ID. I cut the OD first and found out that I could double layer the paper and cut about 20 at once and push the circles out of the punch. The ID has to be cut one at a time because of how dull and ****ty these Harbor Freight punches are (I even tried to sharpen them). I found that if I hammered the ID too hard, the ring would break -- too soft and it would only punch about 80% of the perimeter. The technique I settled on was a double tap with a medium-light blow. 104 rings were not fun to make...
Close up of the roofing tar paper I used. This is the stuff they put on the plywood of your roof before they put shingles down.
Wooden cutting surface. I used a piece of 1"x4" pine to serve as a cutting surface. I would have preferred having something less soft to get a cleaner cut, but this entire project was planned in about 15 mins.
The final o-rings. You can see the ring surface is kind of cone shaped. This is why I would have liked different cutting surface. Now that I think about it, a thick plastic cutting board would have been perfect...
Disassembling the Topre Type Heaven. Pretty easy to disassemble. Only three screws along the back edge of the case, then three or four tabs on the bottom edge. I used a medium-thick guitar pick and pushed the tabs open. Don't use a knife or screwdriver or you will **** the case. Then there are a handful of silver screws that set the PCB/plate distance and a **** ton of black screws that help hold the PCB to the plate.
O-Rings Installed. I found that you don't really need to use a screw driver to remove the Topre sliders. I just pushed the top of the stem with the very tip of my finger until it released. Popped all the sliders back in and reassembled the board.
Unfortunately, I didn't think to take a video of how it sounded before I silenced it.
Here is a video I found of the sound of a stock Topre Type Heaven (with a much better mic than mine
):
And here is the sound after silencing (my crappy video, Galaxy S6):
Sorry about the end of the video, my desk is right next to the shredder
)
In conclusion this cost me $8.99 for the punches (which I will probably use in the future for projects) and took about 2.5 hours. I'm really happy with the way it turned out despite being really cheap and ghetto. I wanted to share this project with the community to promote thinking out of the box. I'm sure some very porous/low density paper will work too (think thick construction paper). I did not lube this board but I can see that being a possible problem for o-rings that have absorption properties (paper or foam). I think if I were to silence any other Topre that was a bit more high-end, I would use another material like gum rubber, silicone, or Dycem but for this keyboard that only cost me 50 bucks, this definitely works!!
My Type Heaven's name is now Roofus!
