Hey KeebTalk,
I’m looking into designing a gasket mounted keyboard and am finding a variety of materials and methods of assembly. I am wondering what makes for the best gasket mounted keyboard? Materials: rubber o-rings, rubber pads, foam? Any input is appreciated!
Cheers!
Hi my friend
It depends what type of gasket mounting you are working with. I think O ring gasket, where you have one O ring around the whole pcb/plate is the easiest to design because there are no mounting screws.
Hello! I believe I would be looking to sandwich the plate between a top and bottom half. Ultimately I am looking for no compromises and trying to understand what makes for a great gasket mounted keyboard and need a solid place to start my RnD. What do the top end gasket mounted keyboards use for their mounting types and materials?
It’s my understanding that the few current “best in class” boards use the method described above—one ring around the whole internal assembly—but I think we’re still pretty far from being able to say gasket mounting has reached its peak (in terms of performance, at least).
In terms of materials, idk about the elastic ring method but poron seems to be the frontrunner material for strip-based gasket mount implementations.
Hope that helps, good luck with your experiments!
The only board I saw with one ring aroung the pcb / plate assembly had theirs on the bottom and I couldn’t tell how the assembly stayed in the keyboard housing. It didn’t look “mounted” per say as it was more just sitting in the shell. Do you have any examples of these “best in class” boards for me to take a look at? I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this one gasket method.
What makes for a great gasket mounted keyboard?
Sorry, the air quotes around “best in class” are there pretty much specifically because the small number of boards vaunted as “the best gasket-mount boards” are also notoriously difficult to obtain and have few (if any) pictures of their internals on the web.
Unfortunately I don’t really have much else to say about this cause: I’m no expert on gasket mounting and I don’t even own a gasket-mounted board.
What is your motivation for selecting the gasket mount construction?
gasket mount is a meme. top mount a pp plate and be done.
Or we could just let people chase their bliss
I kinda gotta agree, I have a few gasket mounted boards now and I’ve been pretty unimpressed, top mount just seems better with less work to me.
I’m not stopping anyone from chasing their bliss. Just sharing my opinion as someone who has designed several boards using various mounting mechanisms. I’ve done tray mount, top mount, gasket mount, compression mount and even have a new bottom mount design I’m excited to try, but at the end of the day my favorite is top mount with plate of choice. if you want flex/bounce pp is a great option. brass is great if you want a very rigid experience and if you want something in between fr4 is a good middle ground.
I am trying to fill a void in the topre world with a gasket mounted variant. The reasons for gasket mounted seem legit; a softer bottoming out keyfeel reguardless of the flexibility of the plate. Having worked on an Evija with a flexible alum plate it seemed that the top mount left for very rigid feeling keys around the edges with softer, flexible, slighly rattly keys in the middle. I don’t know for certain but I was thinking that changing the mount type would make for a more luxurious typing experience.
What materials are PP and fr4? How would you compare these materials to POM?
FR4 is the material PCBs are (generally) made out of. I think PP is polypropylene?
This is all great perspective for @BuddyOG to get, thanks for sharing!
Meh. Get 4 Tofus instead of one gasket or top mount. Tray-mount rules. ;-p
Or, get 3 tray mounts, and 3 large o-rings to turn all of your tray mounts into gasket tray mounts.
I really love my Unikorn which has this setup and would recommend 
This is on my to do list together with a klippe.
Most of the gasket keyboards use gaskets to isolate the plate in the vertical direction, but still leave the plate to scratch with the inner sides.
I feel like the solution to that has been popping up more and more within the high end boards that really brought back gasket mounting in the first place, like Keycult and especially with Dixie’s new taco bumpers on the plate for the new model of the Bauer.
So with that in mind, I think the not-as-top-end gasket mounts will soon enough have this as well.