deskthority

Been planning this for almost a year now but I finally got around to doing it.

This was the first layout I came up with :


and this is the resulting plate :



pro tip : don't wash untreated steel with water + soap and let it in the sun to dry.

The main idea of this keyboard is to have an easily accessible FN key for the left hand. A lot of times my right hand is on the mouse doing stuff and I need to use the arrows or do a quick enter or something. That huge space on the right was left as space for the teensy not actually realizing how tiny the fucking thing is.

This is plate revision 2.0, planning on getting this cut on monday.


And now for the good stuff. A day after I got the plate cut I got a pack of 7 keyboards from a local add which had this beauty : Thin PBT Cyrillic dyesubs in US International (my favorite layout) with stepped Enter and mx stabs (99% of the time you get fucked on the stabs).







After a quick cleaning here they are mounted on the plate.

Nice layout. But have you tested typing on those space bar/s to check against where your thumb wants to go when you usually type?
Having both 2.25 and 2.75 was smart: easier to source Shift keycaps from existing keyboards.

There should be rust-protection primers for steel available at auto supply stores.
An alternative would be plating. I once got a single small steel part plated at a firm for about €15 but it had to wait until they got a large enough order that it could go in together with. It had also taken me a while of phoning around until I found it, and I was lucky to have one not too far from where I live - if there would have had to be shipping, they would probably have refused me.

BTW. Whenever I see a rectangular Enter keycap with a step, I think that it can't be MX-compatible. That's a first.

My thumb goes on the right edge of the left space bar but I'm not sure row 4 keys are the right profile for this. I'll have to play with a few different profiles and see which one fits and if necessary adjust the layout to make it easier to source the keycaps. Matching everything is gonna be a gigantic pain in the ass.

Yeah, I fucking love that enter and pretty much everything about these keycaps.

btw this was the source of the vintage blacks switches I'm using :