deskthority

Topre gold-on-charcoal keycaps are laser etched (to get the gold-colour legends) then clear coated for protection.

Would this also work for white-on-black laser etching (e.g. WASD/Matias) and infilled laser engraving (e.g. Cherry) and protect the legends from staining so quickly?

Do you mean the gold colouring or the clear coating or both?
I wonder if the gold colour comes from the fact that the plastic is PBT? Are there any black lasered PBT Cherry caps?

WASDkeyboards used to make gold colored etching on their black ABS keycaps, but faded very quickly.
I can't see why clear coating wouldn't help, it's just a matter
of how long it'll last and if it will alter the feeling of the keycap.

002 wrote:Do you mean the gold colouring or the clear coating or both?

I am not sure what you are not sure what I mean …

Topre etch the keycaps then cover them with a protective coating. My question is, would clear coating other laser-etched keycaps (e.g. WASD, Matias, Cherry) protect them from staining? (i.e. would the coating be smooth enough to stop the ingrained dirt problem)

I suppose it would but really even the Topre lasered boards will look like shit after a while and some might argue that they look worse than a board that isn't coated because you can see the edges of the blowout of the coating. I actually thought Filco boards had a coating too, but I just took this picture of a colleague's board and it's hard to believe that they are...

For some reason, I wear through the coating on the S key of Filco keyboards (no other keys, just that one). However, I seem to wear away everything but the top-left corner, so the S survives. Filcos are pad printed and we already know that nothing saves them from wear, although it's user-specific: my four-year-old Majestouch keyboards have zero legend wear, but they went shiny within a few months. I guess my pathetic soft skin has averted harm to the printing.

I know that there's simply no alternative to double-shot, and since I don't smoke, I can't reliably compare my results with the Matias (used by a cigarette smoker) and the Cherry (used by former cigarette smokers, now e-cigarette smokers).

I just figured that there may be some advantage to coating laser etching and infill considering that it seems to stain very rapidly and very predictably (just as Filco should swap to POM or PBT to avoid the equally infamous Filco shine). Certainly, my Topre isn't showing any wear of any kind, be that coating, legends (stain or loss) or texture (keyboard or case), to anything except that infamous ABS space bar :) Since my wrists say "no" to Cherry MX and "yes" to Topre, I may be using it for some time to come. (I get nasty case wear around the arrow cluster on Filcos, too.)

I lie … I paid more careful attention to my Realforce, and the keys are a lot more worn than I realised. The PBT has actually gone fairly shiny — I just forgot how matt the keys were when new (e.g. caps lock, alt gr, which see little use). The legends however remain unaffected, and there's no staining of the laser etching.

PBT no longer has my respect :P

Under bright torchlight, even the keycaps on my BBC Micro show a fair amount of wear and shine, but you do need a lot of light for it to become apparent, and the worn keycaps still have the same approximate texture as the un-worn ones (apparently the tab key got next to no use), while the Topre PBT keys show "cellulite" texture from wear. Whatever material people were using for their doubleshots in the 80s, remains unrivalled in its longevity.

They knew what they were doing back in those days. The textures you'll find on classic kit, even after heavy use, are forever impressive.

But here's a trick I had no idea PBT could do:

Doubleshot and translucent for a backlight. Apparently Deck's been up to this for a while.