Build Your Own Keyboard :)

2023-02-19

This post details my experience and processes building my keyboards.

Table of Contents

🐈 Tofu65

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  • Tofu65 Hotswap V3 DIY Kit (KBDfans)
    • black case
    • polycarbonate plate
  • Gazzew U4 Boba Silent Tactile switches (SwagKeys)
  • Durock V2 screw-in stabilizers (Divinikey)
  • GMK Pono keycaps, Cherry profile (bought unsealed from r/mechmarket)
    • included the RAMA x Gray Kitty metal artisan

The Process

Lubing Switches

While many switches come factory lubed, it is usually recommended to hand-lube them as well to your preference. The process from disassemling a switch and lubing it is detailed in this Taeha Types video. Below are videos of my process.

Ignore background noise. It was a struggle filming this and concentrating on opening the switches at the same time.

Lubing Stabilizers

Stabilizers keep the longer keys (ex. shift, space bar) on the keyboard from wobbling. Lubing stabilizers is considered the most important keyboard mod as it makes the greatest difference. I followed this Taeha Types video for lubing the stabilizers.

Assembling Pieces

The last thing to do is put all the pieces together! I didn’t take a video of this, but usually you can find specific instructions online. To be honest, I installed the stabilizers incorrectly twice, so I’ll be careful of that next time.

Conclusion

I am extremely satisfied with my first keyboard build. I chose a 65% layout because I felt like it was the perfect balance of convenience. It has silent switches, so I don’t have to worry about annoying everyone at the library. Next time, I hope to experiment with linear switches. The only thing I dislike is how heavy it is (although I believe it is a “normal” weight for a good mechanical keyboard).

👨‍🔬 Planck

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  • Planck Mechanical Keyboard Kit V6 (Drop)
    • mid-pro case style
    • purple case color
    • steel plate
  • Hippo Linear switches (Kinetic Labs)
  • Durock V2 screw-in stabilizers (Divinikey)
  • Blank PBT keycaps, NP profile (KBDfans)

The Process

Below is a minute-long summary of putting the keyboard together.

Conclusion

It took way less time than expected to get used to the ortholinear keyboard layout, but I am still way slower on it than on the staggered layout. Not only did I have to get used to an ortholinear layout, I also had to get used to using the layers (to type numbers and most symbols) all while on a blank keycap set. Go big or go home. I’m also satisfied with how the Hippo switches sound and feel. My favorite part is how portable this keyboard is!

🍵 Satisfaction75

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  • Satisfaction75 Keyboard Kit (CannonKeys)
    • Seaweed Green case color
    • brass plate
  • Tecsee Coffee Chip Ice Cream Tactile switches (CannonKeys)
  • Owlstab V2 screw-in stabilizers (Qwertykeys)
  • Osume Matcha keycaps, cafe novelty kit and metal artisan (Osume)

The Process

When the Sat75 extras drop was announced by CannonKeys, I literally blocked the time on my calendar. Luckily, I have experience registering for classes. At exactly 11am, I joined the waitlist and was randomly selected to snag a B-stock kit. To be honest, I only notice the tiniest of blemishes if I really look for them, so I think it’s a great value.

To build it, I used the soldering iron at Duke’s Co-lab – I paid tuition, so might as well go use it at least once. This was the first time in my life that I did anything remotely hands-on DIY, much less handling an 800-degree small metal melter.

OLED and Rotary Knob

This keyboard is my first one with a mini-OLED screen and rotary encoder. Are they really useful, or just hyped gimmicks? My answer is: both. But who cares? It sparks so much joy1 to see what layer you’re on or changing your music’s volume with a rotation. Of course, I installed (an open-source) Bongo Cat for the OLED.

💙 EVO70

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Group Buys

This is the first keyboard group buy2 I joined (instead of buying in-stock options like the ones above), and the team behind CustomMK, the creators of this board, couldn’t have made it a better experience. Not to mention, it was extremely affordable in the first place. I joined the group buy in August 2021 and received the kit in June 2022.

I immediately loved this board as soon as I took it out of the box. I can’t get over how great it looks and sounds, and the keycaps set just seals the deal.

🌊 S46

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🧪 Mercutio

Coming soon!

Planned build:

  1. See my blog post on doing small things to make you slightly happier. ↩

  2. A keyboard group buy is basically a pre-order. Many of these keyboards are made-to-order. See this site for more info. ↩

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Why I Mark Up My Books

2022-10-03

In 8th grade, I tried writing in my copy of The Old Man and the Sea because I thought my teacher’s annotated version looked cool. Unfortunately, my handwriting didn’t turn out to be perfectly consistent, and I couldn’t bear looking at it, so I erased it all after only a page.

That’s how I always used to keep my books - pristine - that meant no folds, notes, underlines, highlights, or anything else. Part of this desire was fed by some sense of perfectionism: if it wasn’t a perfectly straight line of highlight, or a perfect annotation, then it couldn’t be included at all. Since it’s impossible to make it all perfect, the fear of ugly margin notes and crooked lines kept me from marking up my books. Furthermore, I felt like the value decreased if I didn’t keep it clean.1

It wasn’t until I started consciously thinking of books as something beyond an amalgamation of words that I changed this habit. In fact, I took an entire class at Duke on this subject at called the History of the Book.2

I was sold on this class when the description mentioned we’d go on field trips to the Rubenstein Rare Manuscript Library. It turns out that books with evidence of multiple owners’ stamps or scrawled, faded annotations (some made by the same person at different times) were the most interesting. We would all crowd around the librarian as they carefully flipped through the delicate pages of these books, some of which were centuries older than us.

Each book had a story that it told not only through its physical text but also as a meta-story of itself: whether it was carved in clay, written with reed pens and rolled up, inked using stamps and mass produced, passed through multiple hands, or disappeared in history only to show up at some Baron’s house in England, this meta-story can turn out to be as interesting as the text itself.

Even if you don’t think the joy of going through the book’s meta-story or the lives of its owners can be interesting in its own right, consider the implications it has on historical study. For example, reading someone’s margin notes from the 18th century can indicate the thoughts and ideas of the time. And humans, who are endlessly good at trying to create connections, find that we can empathize with a fellow person through time and space through writing.

twitter post of a letter from Charles Darwin describing that he felt 'very poorly'

Thus, the value of a marked book may go down monetarily, but it goes up in a different way.

For a while, I’ve been latently obsessed with a lofty, personalized idea of posterity in minor ways. Some habits of mine add up so that if a modern day Vesuvius happens in New Jersey, USA, later historians can use my preserved records as a case study:

  • Often, my journal entries are written as if someone (not myself) in the far future were to read them.
  • My upkeep of an extensive (online) personal library and closet organization is mostly for my own sake, but it’s a tiny bit for the off chance that someone studying people of the early 2000s can see what one anonymous person read or wore.
  • Photos and school notes are backed up in multiple locations, again mostly for my own sake, but just in case a later scientist wants to see what life was like at this time.

Keeping the physical copies of my books in good condition is also a way to feed into my tiny obsession with posterity. That way, later people can find and read the books I’ve also read. But marking up my books can still be consistent with that idea. Each crooked line of highlight, each point of connection I write about in the margins, is an extension of my thoughts and reality, of my lived experience. Besides, it’s probably good for (my abstract notion of) “posterity” to point out the most important lines in a book or to include clarifications on unclear passages. (If it turns out to be a wrong interpretation, all the better.)

In a sort of false-profound way, it’s some proof that I existed, that I was here. I actually used to not care at all about that, but I’ve been thinking differently nowadays - about what kind of residue I’d leave behind.

  1. Maybe this feeling came from when my mom wouldn’t allow my brother to write in workbooks when he was a kid. He wrote answers in a separate notebook because then I could reuse the workbook when I came of age. Did this happen to anyone else? ↩

  2. Interestingly, I got polarized reviews when I said I was taking a history of the book class. A few friends said that’s “really cool”, and another person I know said “Ugh… Well as long as you like it, Christine,” which is what you say to your friend when they show you a picture of the new guy they’re talking to, but he’s ugly. ↩

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