Some photos of my latest keyboard. It's taken about 6 months to source the parts for this. Totally worth it. These photos are resized. For full size photos please see the album on my flickr account. It's not really a full build log, since there wasn't much to do other than mod the switches, solder on diodes and solder on switches.
Here are the parts :
Spoiler:
The MXALPS-30XX PCB designed by Leeku. Meant to fit in Cherry G80/G81-3XXX cases.
NCR Logo
NCR branded G81-3077SAU case
Label
Nixdorf black
Sprits gold plated 65g spring
Throughhole diodes from G80 switches
Old Cherry PCB-mount stabilisers that use screws to mount
Lightly used ANSI doubleshots from a G81-3000HAU variant
Coiled PS2 cable from Cherry G81-3011HBG
A few pictures mid-build :
Spoiler:
Soldering a diode to the SMD pads. I did this incase I ever need to desolder all the switches. Saves me from desoldering 4 pins per switch.
Switches soldered on. Stabilisers installed. Stabilisers lubed with GPL205/103 mix. Springs seated.
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Switches closed up.
PCB installed in the case.
Windowed esc-row Cherry logo key taken from G80-2000HAD.
A member of the Korean communities sold me two of the PCBs. He had them left over from a group buy he did.
I'm not sure why the white line's there, although I seriously doubt it's to help you cut the numpad off. If you look at the PCB photo you can see that you'd be cutting the end off a bunch of traces.
The Korean Custom boards are spectacular, but you end up spending as much money for the case as for the PCB+switches+caps.
Using the widely available Cherry cases lets you have a working board cheap, and then they could probably sell an aftermarket case for those who really wanted one.
I am a little surprised at the lock switch position options-- there's "far left", like Cherry, "1.5x in a 1.75x spot", but no "centered"
I'd rather not know which keyboards had to bleed to allow you to make this one.
Don't tell me you took the Escape key from... yes, from exactly "that one"...
kbdfr wrote:I'd rather not know which keyboards had to bleed to allow you to make this one.
Don't tell me you took the Escape key from... yes, from exactly "that one"...
Don't worry, the only Cherry keyboards that were killed to make this were G81s! The case is from a G81, the keycaps are from a G81 (except the lock keys - those are from a set of G80-1191 keycaps I bought ages ago), the PCB is a custom one, and _that_ key was only put on there for photos. I can't bring myself to tear it away from the 2000 for more than 30 minutes!
I don't want to be the last one to praise photekq's photos. Awesome!
And @madhias, yes, the "Escape row profile Cherry key" is more than rare.
Apparently only the G80-2000 and the first generation G80-2100 (not the quite usual later model) had it.
I know of only one remaining keyboard of each.
kbdfr, quite a while ago there was also a small group buy run through Cherry on one of the Korean communities for remakes of the esc-row Cherry windowed keys - an example. I'm not too sure on the details - maybe someone else could fill us in. Almost all of them that exist are from that group buy.
