deskthority

As you might remember, back in March 2012, I drove by Signature Plastics and took a couple of pictures from the outside. Yesterday, Ben from SP invited a few of us in the Greater Seattle area to visit SP. And we did. Ben took us for a tour around the factory, explained to us how font legends are made, doubleshots keys are shot, and how dyesub keys are dyed. Here are a few pictures of the keycaps I took home.


Here are pictures of my PS loot:

Goodie Bag:


What's inside the goodie bag:


What is known as the first shot:


Keycaps after the second shot, these are our custom-made OP caps:



These are made with custom metallic silver color, not available to order. We made enough for metallic silver blank WASD and the nipple keys. Well actually more than enough for two rolls of blanks:


A variety of spacebars, very nice colors:


A variety of first shots. Some of these have transparent clear as the second shot, and you can see how the first shot and the second shot are joined together:


Super thick keycaps, heavier than your regular keycaps:


Marble style, not available for order:


Silver and clear first shot keycaps. The CapsLock keys are metallic red. Both are not available for order:


These I think are the coolest of all. The second shot is made of RUBBER! Not available for order:


Also very cool, wood style keycaps, Not available for order:


Some other random keys:

Cool picks man!
I'm kinda jealous.

Why can they make so much that is not for sale.

Cool stuff, I like all the hybrids/half products!

wow, those metallic keys look great and that blue half done Caps Lock would look killer on my keyboard

Ben was our host. He is the technical manager there. He made a lot of those caps as experiments. A lot of them are hard to make consistently so it would be hard for quality control.

Just got OK from Ben that I can post this video. It gives you a very good idea how a keycap is made.

litster wrote:Just got OK from Ben that I can post this video. It gives you a very good idea how a keycap is made.

Dear lord do they make all their caps like that?
No automation?

Yummy. Like Belgian waffles.

First shot is automated, and can be configured to run over night. But the second shots require manual labor.

thx Litster that's a very instructive thread !

Too bad those keys are not for order...



Amazing combo. Why is this not available for order?

I expect the wiki article on [wiki]Double-shot molding[/wiki] to be expanded with a lot more illustrations now! ;-) (Note that the consensus is no watermarks on images.)

guilleguillaume wrote:Too bad those keys are not for order...

Amazing combo. Why is this not available for order?

I think they are new. Ben put these out and asked for our opinion.

Here is a close crop of the same picture.

haha that is pretty much how I had imagined it.
that half finished caps lock looks great.
any photos of the facility or melissa?

PS YAY ROUND 4 pause key

Melissa wasn't there. Ben was the only one who was there with us. But Melissa and the own Bob prepared the goodie bags for us. If we didn't scare them off, Ben said he might do it again, in 10 years .

I have more pictures. Most of them I should not post due to confidentiality. When we where there, we saw a few group buys' productions in progress (but paused for the weekend).

So many nice things <3

Very cool! I didn't actually realized that the first shot was the one inside the keycap, I thought it was the other way around!

Fantastic thread! and proof that sprue marks can be AVOIDED if they only snipped the caps and didn't twist them off!

So, a translucent 1shot + a non-translucent base would make keycaps for keyboards with backlight?

I love the metallic red colour - would buy a set without hesitating.

After seeing the video, I don't feel bad about spending so much money on caps - I never realised how much human input there was in the process.

I like their notice boards - especially that they've glued some keycaps to it.

I totally want that spherical Vim key.
I guess they have a bunch of stuff from old group buys just sitting around that we can't get our hands on!

it would be pretty cool to get a 87/104 set done with spherical profile. There is a set like that with 7bit's round 4, right?

Clear caps are nice.

litster wrote:it would be pretty cool to get a 87/104 set done with spherical profile. There is a set like that with 7bit's round 4, right?

Yea, there is. I bought one and that's why it would be awesome to have a spherical Vim key to go with it. I've been sort of looking out for one in the classifieds over in geekhack but nobody seems to have any spare ones. It's not that popular a novelty key to begin with being the problem, so there's probably not too many extras floating around.

I quite like the look of marbled and 'wood' caps. Lots of stuff I knew they could do technically that I have asked them about in the past they claimed could not be done shown there. Hopefully they will reconsider that position now there is proof they can.

Fake metal and marble looks cheap to me. The wood caps looks like baked turds. It had to be said.

Great pictures. Thanks for sharing those !

We need more nipple keys

litster wrote:Melissa wasn't there. Ben was the only one who was there with us. But Melissa and the own Bob prepared the goodie bags for us. If we didn't scare them off, Ben said he might do it again, in 10 years .

I have more pictures. Most of them I should not post due to confidentiality. When we where there, we saw a few group buys' productions in progress (but paused for the weekend).

Are there any pics of the group buys that you can show ?