Just built that BM43a today, kinda as a “cheap and orange” themed keyboard, with completely orange colored, but rather crappy, wobbly and not that clicky “TTC Orange Blue Clicky” switches (what a name! ) and" JTK Orange on Black CS:GO" (aka “JTK Charred Orange”) as key cap set.
Tried to at least keep the profile proper, but that didn’t work out for the Enter key being used as Spacebar and the Menu key being used as Tab. And of course the left 0/Ins is a Shift key and the bottom right one is the Menu key, The two Star keys are Ctrl and Alt and the Anchor key is the OS key And the only Shift key is actually a SpaceFn while Enter is a pure space key.
The only not cheap parts in this build are the Millmax sockets I soldered in.
So here are two potato shots, the first outside during a cloudy sunset:
Here actually the anodization even looks like an orange color and seems not that far away from the keycap set’s orange.
And the other shot is indoors with warm-white LED lighting (same mobile phone camera and both times no flash):
Here the case IMHO looks rather like a cold gold and not really orange, with a big difference to the key cap set’s orange.
So it’s not as bad as I remembered it when writing this posting initially, but I still think the case color and the keycaps don’t really fit together colorwise as I usually use keyboards indoors…
And the BM43a’s quite unique R3 to R4 offset of 0.75u is also way more awkward and annoying than I expected. I’m probably to much more used to uniform stagger (via Zlant and UT47.2) whose R3 to R4 offset is also a 0.25u off compared to standard stagger, but in the opposite direction, i.e. just a 0.25u offset between those two rows.
I’m also annoyed by the position of the .>
key and wonder of I should rather use a cursor key layout like this:
Looks ugly, but is actually quite usable. I use a similar layout on the second layer of all my 60% keyboards without dedicated cursor keys: Fn-Menu and Fn-Control are left and right and Fn-Enter and Fn-Shift are Up and Down. Especially my daily driver at work, a Tex Yoda II has this style of cursor keys. (Yeah, I’m no vi user and I’m no fan of HJKL, )
Addendum: Just noticed that despite the BM43a is 0.75u less wide than my MiniVan Catalyst with aluminium case (12u vs 12,75u), it is remarkably heavier. Probably because of that chamfering on the upper side of the case.