Indeed not. From RAMA’s last update in Q1 of last year, a few of the colors were in production, but that some other colors needed the tooling adjusted to look right.
I’ve heard of tooling adjustments, but not so much on a per-color basis.
I stumbled upon the manufacturer for these on instagram (or more accurately an employee’s account), and I’m pretty sure that “clones” made from that tooling in other colors have been floating around the wild for a while. From the appearance of things RAMA is imposing a high QC standard so if he ever releases the caps I’d imagine they’ll be very good indeed - but it also looks like non-perfectionist iterations have been showing up on rando Chinese boards for something like a couple years now.
No doubt, indeed. Got an email from them today saying as much, without naming any names. Gist of it was
RAMA as an entity has been basically MIA for 2 years because court stuff but we’re working on everything and aren’t going away, hope we can move past the shenanigans this year and get back to making lots of fun design-y stuff
Definitely my paraphrasing but I think I did it justice.
Post-GB communication in this hobby is an area that could use a lot of improvements.
Since I joined Class60 GB, I have not received any notification from GB host nor the distributor (KeebsForAll). I had to go to their Discord channel to learn that Class60s have been shipped to distributors, taking them two months to package and ship to US distributors.
It’s not just communication but information persistence. There is a tendency among keyboard product vendors to keep product pages up only while they’re being sold. WTF?
I have been noticing this a lot too. On the IC, it is always the designers’ discord, so I end up joining that. However then you have to join your regional vendors’ discord as well just to get the final updates. It is all a little too much. In this sense, it would be nice to go back to the GB page on GH because then vendors and designers can comment on the same thread.
I’ve had precisely one GB from KFA and its soured me on that vendor forever, which was for the Freebird TKL.
Essentially their “Navy” and “olive” colorways weren’t properly color matched to the original renders, and no images of the prototypes were available on the Keebsforall page for the FBTKL so buyers weren’t able to see the actual units. Then the units shipped to customers from KFA, where they looked like this instead of the original renders:
They eventually sent out a Google Form to all customers who purchased the Navy/Olive asking if they wanted it recolored or sent as is, but the whole time I followed the initial discussion on Discord until the form was sent out I received precisely 0 emails regarding the status of the colorway or shipments.
Extremely disorganized communication, and no updates on the shipping status was made through email or on their website.
I join your high-five! Along these lines, the CannonKeys Project Updates page is phenomenal (but it does take a second click to find it).
I think I’m in like 90 discords, with all but like three related to keyboards. Searching on Discord or trying to keep up with it is awful. Full stop. It’s fun for dipping into chats about particular projects and useful for community tech support, but it’s tedious to try to keep up with where a group buy is in the process. Email or a status page work so much better.
