RazorLAB.online :: GLOBAL FREE SHIPPING in Sep 🎉

Salute citizens of KeebTALK :wave:

We are new to your platform and super excited to be part of it!

We provide laser cutting & engraving services based in London, UK (proudly shipping globally).

After talking to some of our customers, who are keyboard enthusiasts like yourselves, we have been encouraged to say hello here. This month we are running an awesome promo to kickstart our presence at KeebTALK:

:drum: :drum: :drum: FREE SHIPPING GLOBALLY :drum: :drum: :drum:

We thought this is a good time as things are going back to normal, whatever that may be! :scream:

All you need is to start live chat at razorlab.online and mention FREESEP.

One of our colleagues will help you out and answer your burning questions!

PS: As the RazorLAB team, we are growing personal interests to build our own too. We shall see what we can do. Watch this space!

Happy September! :raised_hands:

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Kinda strange to see laser cutting service with no metals of any kind. But I guess that’s why the shipping is free =)

To clarify, each laser cutting company has their own army of machines. We only use CO2 machines which are not capable of cutting metals.

GLOBAL FREE SHIPPING promo we are running at the moment, has completely a different story where we want to kickstart the community’s creations during Sep, especially with Covid things are slowly going back to normal.

Hope you find it useful too! :wink:

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Interesting! I can definitely think of a few fun projects than can be done on a laser. Hmm…

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Cool ! Welcome guys !

It would be awesome if you could collect a dictionary of popular keyboard plates and even less popular ones like topre FC980c / fc660c / Realforce TKL etc

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Your site doesn’t contain any information on the machine(s) you use or, most importantly, your achievable tolerances/repeatability. And yet, it contains this BS:

You should sort out your priorities, I’d never dream of getting anything laser cut by a company that doesn’t readily supply (i.e without requesting) information on their capabilities.

Heavy emoji usage =/= reputable service

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Gotta say I wondered about that, too…

It is def in our todo list. Perhaps you can provide us with a list of what you would love to see there in terms of types, on top of the ones you have already listed?

We will update as we progress and launch a keyboard dedicated section! :raised_hands:

Hey @photekq,

This is Soner, founder of sister companies RazorLAB and MakersCAFE, both operating from London, UK.

Thanks for your feedback, which we found partly fair and partly unfair. Let me clarify:

Background:
We founded RazorLAB in 2009, as the UK manufacturing hub for Ponoko (which I am sure you are already familiar with). Within years, we separated our ways with them and as of 1st of April 2020, we decided to become completely independent (as in we are not any more using their backend) and to develop our own pricing and job management tools. We are still in the process of developing and super excited to bring them to our community.

Machine and material details:
Fair. You are absolutely right. The descriptions (ie. machine specs and achievable tolerances/repeatability) are completely missing and as mentioned above, these are all in work in progress. Our team is working very hard to bring these to our community as fast as possible. As you can imagine, all the businesses got affected heavily by the latest circumstances and we are not excluded from that. We are in the process of juggling around what machine/s we can make available and what materials we can source safely. We are very optimistic with getting back to track very soon though.

BS:
Unfair. Here is a bit more info about myself. And here are a selection of links (the ones we are allowed to make public due to confidentiality) with regards to our clients:
Gillette: GILLETTE — MakersCAFE
Google: GOOGLE — MakersCAFE
Adidas: ADIDAS — MakersCAFE
Victorinox: VICTORINOX — MakersCAFE
O2: O2 — MakersCAFE
Lego: LEGO — MakersCAFE

Priorities:
Fair. You are right. Material details are very crucial in terms of informing our customers about what is possible and limitations, etc. I guess our assumption was to build these up as FAQs according to the Live Chat conversations we have on our website and eventually add them to our materials page. Def sth to work on.

Emojis:
Fair. We absolutely agree. ‘Heavy emoji usage’ does not mean ‘reputable service’ and it should not do. We proud ourselves for being ‘customer friendly’ and I should admit we love emojis! Please free to challenge us on our Live Chat in your spare time :wink:

Finally, please don’t take our word for it, please see what others say at Google Reviews.

Apologies for the long reply. Just wanted to clarify, hope you appreciate.

We’re super excited to be part of this community and want to learn as much as share our experience with you guys.

All the best.
S

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Soner, thanks so much for addressing everything I brought up in such a professional way; this is what I love to see.

I look forward to seeing your machine specs, achievable tolerances etc. when you’re able to publish them. Depending on those, I might be a customer. The main reason I brought it up is: I’ve seen far too many keyboard enthusiasts approach acrylic/wood laser cutting services with their designs, only to find out they don’t function correctly upon arrival. Tolerances/repeatability that may be suitable for other purposes quite often aren’t when it comes to keyboards, especially in the typically high tolerance realm of acrylic/wood laser cutting. I’d hate to see people have the same experience with a service advertised directly to keyboard enthusiasts. I hope you understand.

I’m sorry for getting the “BS” part wrong. I didn’t intend that in an aggressive way, I’m just so used to people approaching this community (not just this particular forum) with aggressive (bullshit) marketing practices. This has been getting especially bad in recent years as the hobby has grown so much, and as the hobby has become so much more profitable. I did try and look into your company further and was unable to find any of the provided links, so I incorrectly assumed the worst. My bad on that, and thanks for addressing it.

Also, I didn’t mean to imply that you’re not a reputable service. Your Google reviews are stellar. Again, I’ve just been jaded by the marketing that’s been aimed at this community in the past (and present) by services/companies that have, in the long run, turned out to be entirely unreputable. Don’t let me dissuade your emoji usage :kissing_closed_eyes:

You’ll definitely find this community more interested in the technical side of your offerings though. Further to my suggestion about tolerances/repeatability, it’d be good if you could provide the exact specifications of the acrylics and other materials you use. Most of those details won’t matter to the majority, but some of them might matter to someone.

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Just commissioned some acrylic plates and case components from these makers yesterday. They were able to take official reference PDFs in my case, which really helped me since these case files were not in standard formats for laser cutters. Prices are reasonable, and free worldwide shipping was a very nice selling point since I am not from the UK. Their current material offerings are not particularly vast, but what they do have seems to be quite respectable. Their Neptune acrylic is 10/10 from the sample images I saw, so I’m eager to see how it appears in person. Just look at this stuff!


I keep having a bit of concern if dimensions are going to be right, but as self-professed keyboard enthusiasts, I think I can rest with ease that they know what they’re doing. Finishing off with the invoice was easy to do over Paypal (just make sure to state if you are from outside the UK so you don’t pay VAT). I was provided a near despatch time, which is great since I was willing to wait well over a month (and no longer have to!)

I looked around the market for a few weeks before deciding if I wanted to contract RazorLAB for this personal project, but I’m glad that they were able to accommodate my needs and help me get this started. I truly appreciate when a company and its members can make my work easier for me, so I’m just posting my experience in case anyone else was on the fence. Thanks, Soner and Robbie; I’m looking forward to seeing your team’s work!

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Hey @Kiessling, super nice to see your comments here. Glad we could help :raised_hands:

RE: materials. We would love to hear from you how we can improve our material selection, what sort of materials would be a good addition?

Your job is scheduled for beginning of next week. We will update as soon as we have progress.

Have a lovely weekend! :tada:

Robbie from RazorLAB Team

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Hey Robbie, thank you for updating me on my pieces! I saw that I received a notice for the design and material review yesterday. It’s nice to see it moving along so smoothly.

With regards to material selection, aside from standard polycarbonates or hardwoods, perhaps something like nylon or FR4 would be received well? I think those could be popular with keyboard enthusiasts here and elsewhere. It would also be interesting to see if there may be options for scratch-resistant acrylics, too.

It may be a good idea to offer a fuller library of colors across the currently available material/finish types. For example, there appear to be no purples at the moment, and the categorization and thickness offerings seem to vary. Most of the acrylics seem to be available at 3mm, with exception of the clear and black acrylics coming in at 3mm and 5mm. A quick reference of ideal uses for each material type could be helpful as well. Color-codes listed for matching purposes, if you want to go all out with it. Overall, a simple way to filter materials by color, available thickness, and transparency would be nice.

Besides material choice and selection, one thing I’d personally encourage your team to do is to curate a small library of images from past and present jobs. I recently saw some acrylic cuts by a company you know well, and I was quite impressed with the results and finish in them. In fact, it makes me even more eager to see what kind of results I’ll have with my own pieces from RazorLAB. It could inspire quite a few people to commission your team to make custom cuts for them if they saw more real-life results in that way.

It may seem like I’ve suggested a lot, but it is my belief that small details are what will encourage a lot of people to try a service like this. So, maybe you might find benefit in an idea or two of mine. In any case, I do wish you all the best in your growing business!

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Hey @Kiessling,

Thanks for all the feedback.

Here is a summary for our records as well:

  • Material request: Nylon / FR4 / sketch resistant acrylic
  • Color request: ie. more purples
  • Thickness request: other than 3/5mm
  • UI/UX: filter color/thickness/transparency
  • Inspirational images: of past/present jobs

We noted all above, some of which are already have in our to-do list. I guess these are all possible, given enough time/demand. Even if we do not have them listed on our website yet, please feel free to make a manual request on LIVE CHAT and we will do our best to source (or you can post us) as long as they are safe and ok to cut with our CO2 laser machines.

Thanks again for your support!

Best wishes.
Soner from RazorLAB Team

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