LOVE the little quacker! A little display niche definitely going in my list of ideas to steal.
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Thanks. There is a little magnet glued into a recess in the bottom of the case so it can be swapped out.
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So fun!
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Today I built the s58m keyboard that I picked up on mechmarket.
Not bad for $80! It’s a nice board with a little work.
I love the vibration finish on the brass. It had a lot of patina and was very orange when I got it. A little bar keepers friend and it’s like new. Added a coating of mineral oil and it has kept it from oxidizing as quickly.
It is top mounted. Brass plate with BSUN maple sugars.. I added small orings as gaskets between the brass plate and top. That fixed 75% of the feel and sound. Then I added a strip of painters tape around the bottom brass section to isolate it from the top case. That was also a large improvement.
It’s compatible with all standard 60% PCBs so I used one of the WT60 Hotswap PCBs that I recently picked up from Novelkeys on clearance.
Speaking of that… I ordered 3 PCBs and got 4! What a nice bonus 
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My other $80 pickup. A hive60. Never built until today.
Built with some hand assembled MM switches. Blue top, purple bottom, yellow stems, 62g springs. Brass plate. Very solid but not harsh. Lovely keyboard. The DCS caps keep it pretty poppy on keypress. Sound is exceptional with no hint of ping or hollowness. No mods needed.
Also put MTNU WoB on my black Fjell. This one has SWK ripples. With the MTNU it is deafeningly thocky. lol. You need hearing protection to use this one.
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I thought my Alf X2 was broken but it turned out it just had bad firmware and a couple of the keys weren’t programmed to do anything for some reason. The enter key was also not clicking so I replaced that switch. The zealiostotles in there are pretty janky but I really like the sound.
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Now, that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.
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I know there are better switches out there nowadays but I actually quite like them here.
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Trying something new with my laser dye-sub caps. My old jig indexed on a couple of standoffs, and I was having real trouble getting that last half-millimeter of alignment. I might still have that issue indexing on the sharp lower-left and upper-right corners of this plate (courtesy both of a piece of scrap just a skosh too small to use for the final switch-plate and a bunch of generic red switches), but at least any misalignment will be completely consistent. The SLK blanks are also just the tiniest bit wider at the base than most profiles, better to accommodate the travel with lower height I assume, so I needed some sort of new jig for them anyway. Pretty soon here, I will sacrifice a few 1u to testing.
I still haven’t quite landed on my legend design, and my persistent issues with perfect centering make me hesitant to go with what ought to be obvious placement. Still, there was at least one Siemens board with tophat caps that placed the legends off center, and I’ve seen MA clones do something similar. I’m wondering if something dramatically italic in the upper left would help make my tooling limitations feel intentional.
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Yep! Dramatically different from the norm is “design” while slightly off is a mistake.
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Blech. My usual “recipe” for this process on Aliexpress blanks did not work well at all on the SLK. Fortunately, I was smart enough to just ruin two 1u caps on the initial tests. Need to decide if I just table this while I still have a set of blanks I could use or sell, or if I start experimenting on the ISO enter.
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Been slowly replacing the springs in my MX boards to CannonKeys 18mm 58g. Trying to keep the excitement of the newness from clouding my opinion, but if my opinion after these couple of weeks holds… I’ll be using this in all my MX boards going forward.
Shorter springs feel sluggish at the top now, and I just don’t enjoy the 22mm springs I’ve tried. 18mm seems like the happy middle ground.
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Took apart my Realforce R3 with Hangul caps and traded out most of the domes for 50g “Pepper” Astrodomes. This is pretty much exactly what I wanted: they’re just a tiny bit heavier and a good bit more tactile than the stock 45g silent domes, Sneakbox sent a single strip of four 500g “Texas Tea” domes as well. I put them on Esc and the rarely used “Legacy 3” cluster, and hoo buddy am I glad I didn’t use them elsewhere. I’m not sure they’re truly 500g, but these things are memeworthy.
While I had it open I lubed the 2u stabs and slapped in as many steel wheel weights as would fit because who doesn’t want their expensive Topre board to follow the design philosophy of counterfeit Beats headphones? I also threw on the red Esc key the guy from Leaderkeys threw in gratis when I bought the board in Seoul.
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I’m constantly modding my zeal clickiez tactile leaves to get them to feel right.
The modding process isn’t consistent (it involves me bending the tactile leaf fractions of a mm with my fingers), so I have to mark the differences between switches and place them accordingly:
Switches with no markings on the mount have the lightest tactility and go under my pinky and/or fourth finger; switches with one vertical bar are medium; switches with a cross are the heaviest and go under my index fingers, the space bar, or modifiers that I hit with my thumbs.
It’s a feature, not a bug! 
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Everyone else here has posted in this thread, here’s what’s on my workbench… well actually, nothing literally, I’m still in the pcb design phase: I’m working on a prototype to finally integrate a trackpoint into a katana60
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