Zen and the Art of Keyboard Building

I’ve been reading posts on Keebtalk and what comes through most is the joy that people have about keyboard building. So as a sort of homage to that joy and Pirsig’s book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, a book about searching for quality and value, I thought it might be interesting to have a post where we could share the Zenish moments we have when working on keyboards. Here’s my first one:

The attic is quiet. Muted, unintelligible voices filter up, a door closes, soft footsteps pattering on a carpeted hallway below. I clear the desk of clutter, position the desk lamp, and layout my small plastic tool tub. I’m a novice and have only the basics: a switch puller, a keycap puller, loose alan wrenches, a few precision screwdrivers that I found in one of my mother’s junk drawers, a stem holder, a tweezers (also found in that junk drawer), a small scissors, and some lube. A keyboard is in front of me. I’m still searching for that perfect sound signature and don’t even know what it is for me. I’m too new to the hobby to know. Today, I want to remove all of the foam and try a tape mod. I put on a set of 2.0+ reading glasses, and put the 2.5+ aside. When I need to see detail, I wear one over the other. My daughter laughs when she sees me doing this. Then I laugh. I take a breath and remind myself that the build is the joy. Take time. Enjoy removing the keycaps and switches, relish unscrewing the case, the plate, the stabilizers. Put away each tool when you are done with it, keep the screws together and safe. This I’ve learned the “hard way”, realizing that I have spent a good portion of my life looking for things that were simply not put away or looking for things that I have put away in a special place so I would not lose them, only to forget where that special place was. Breath. Enjoy. Pay attention to detail. Pay attention. Of course, I want perfection and work toward it, but the result is just the result, not really the end at all. The rest of the world fades away and I am with my keyboard.

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I mean, the author literally went insane searching for those things because they are slippery concepts to define. In many ways the book is actually about trying to escape from that search.

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It wasn’t my intention to discuss Pirsig’s book. If necessary, I can change the homage to Zen and the Art of Archery. I’ll just say this and then let it go: I’m not sure that Pirsig intended for readers to give up on their searches, even the search for meaning and value. And mental illness does not mean that a search is bad or wrong or should be abandoned, but we might need to reflect on how we conduct the search itself. He talks about value traps, but it is a trap when we get hung up on a value and don’t want to re-evalute our values in light of conflicting evidence. He doesn’t say give up at all. He discusses reasons why people give up and one of them is lack of knowledge. I felt that Keebtalk is fantastic because it exists partly to pass on knowledge and keep people motivated. He suggests that we should work methodically and pay attention to detail, again qualities that I feel help in life and are wonderfully reflected in this insane hobby. Anyway, I do apologize if I’ve offended. I really only meant to give people space to share their own peace in this hobby.

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“I drop all of the golden springs from my HHKB onto my light brown carpet and I scream the most vulgar words known to man.” Keyboard building isn’t zen for me unfortunately.

Don’t even get me started about reassembling Alps switches…

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  1. I had a Pirsig phase (which I think is at least healthier than a Rand phase), and I still think my 10th grade English paper about the Metaphysics of Quality was probably better than the other crap my classmates were putting out, even if it was precious and conclusive in the way that only a teenager who has discovered THE TRUTH can be.

  2. As Pirsig recommended more beer can shims in the maintenance of motorcycles, we need more beer-can shims in the building of keyboards.

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Oh no no no, I don’t mean to imply that I’m offended or that you’re wrong because I don’t accept either of those. I even agree that you can justify that Keebtalk is about quality and value. But clearly mental illness is not a direct consequence of a focus on excellence. What Pirsig describes is a trap made by his own psyche that turned his own vulnerabilities into illness.

Although I do think that the possibility of madness lurks close by when one becomes so consumed by keyboards(*) that no time is left for writing. Or if not madness, at least the loss of rational balance(**)

(*) The word “keyboards” could be replaced by almost anything from goldfish to crochet.

(**) There are people posting both here and on GH that are most probably on the risky end of the rational balance spectrum.

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That first encounter with a switch opener, discovering how fiddly it is to unlatch the clips, and at last the top comes open and, ping, the stem and spring find a new home in a dark corner behind the leg of some heavy furniture.

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For two months I’ve had only a Logitech K380 in front of me. Practical, great for traveling, but hardly the audio-tactile sensation I’ve been craving. Perhaps worse, nothing to tinker with, no keyboard mods, no switches, no keycaps or stabs. I’ve been reading the Keebtalk boards, and appreciate the discussions and responses to my questions. They’ve kept me in the game, helped prepare me for the moment I can quietly and calmly rebuild a keyboard. But reading without practice is thin, like listening to recordings of other people’s keyboards. Possibly provocative but not fulfilling. It occurs to me that in another lifetime there might be a VR world where a keyboard is a headset away or computer-brain interface obviates even the need for that. In this world I will be a Luddite.

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My affinity for mechanical keyboards is irrational. A keyboard is a tool. It should be like using a hammer or a drill. I suppose that carpenters do, in fact, prefer the heft of one hammer over another; appreciate the feel of swinging a well-balanced mallet through time and space; enjoy the sharp crack of steel on steel. I cannot claim that a keyboard is so much more than a hammer in the grand scheme of the universe. I won’t even attempt an excuse. The affinity exists. I seek cases and keycaps that hold me in their orbit. I seek switches that sing and spring under my fingers. I tune my keyboard to my being and I think, the familiarity principle suggests, it tunes me to it. The inanimate animates the animated and is it not possible that it too becomes animate? Undeniably, it accumulates a subtle power. It draws me toward it: the possessor possessed. It is a shadow muse, not inspiring me by love but by use, a marginal sanity, where I am compelled to work so that the keyboard is a thing of action and purpose and by transference, so am I. It is a mirage I accept, a delusion of existence, a confounding artifact that gives me just enough purpose that I stop hunting for underlying mechanisms. This, perhaps, is the allure: the keyboard is, ironically, the underlying mechanism of my existence as I seek meaning. At least, if my thoughts are confused and opaque, my keyboard is beautiful and responsive, ordered and predictable, and of course, it thocks.

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Man feed machine, machine feed man - Peter Gabriel

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“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

I don’t know why we like keyboards intrinsically. But here we are :smiley:

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How I feel is put far less eloquently than above.

I don’t know much, but I do know I like what I like.

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In my opinion, keyboard building with its endless variations and tastes is one of the few avenues in life that still allows for the expression of creativity, whilst still creating something useful.

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Keycaps are my undoing. While switches are alluring, and I fully understand why some of you are infatuated with them, I’m just not as discriminating as many of the hobbyists here. But keycaps trumpet until my walls crumble. I troll online vendors hunting for golden chalice candidates. I put them in my baskets and wait. I fall asleep imagining the sets on my boards, wake up in the morning, and check out my carts. I clearly have a problem…which set to buy? At first, I shunned white on black and black on white sets because I’d spent a lifetime typing on cheap, colorless membrane boards. With mechanical keyboards, the rainbow is the pot of gold at the end of itself. At first I coveted darker sets: Keychron Royal, GMK Redsuns, Akko Black and Gold. I longed for Mictlan, Skiidata, Solarized Dark, Cyber. I toyed with Dasher and Dancer. Saturated with darkness, I sought out light: Serika, EPBT Fall, HSA Hyperfuse, Extended 2048, Cerakeys yellow and water blue, Osume Zen and Winterglow. My carts were full.

Then the culling and the pain. It is like watching unrealized gains tank. I have to remind myself that I have not really lost anything; I never had them. But it feels like loss! Every time I click on remove or minus one, I feel the heartache of watching a 1976 Corvette going end over end. To mitigate the agony, I load up the most coveted sets with two or three spares. Clicking on minus one still hurts; after all I am relinquishing immortality, but at least, I tell myself, with any luck, I will have a decade. Are you so different? If you could clone your cat and imbue it with its keystroke history, wouldn’t you? And wouldn’t you be sad if you couldn’t afford it?

Over a period of days I whittle down the $1000+ lists to two keyboard sets, though to be honest the number is as volatile as tech stocks during the dot com bubble. Somehow, miraculously, when all seems lost there is an inexplicable recovery. But in the end, it is two. This is discipline.

With my hooks set, I hunker down, ready to reel them in when a sale hits. And then a very strange thing happens. While I’m waiting, I keep trolling, and the sets I’ve so carefully and painfully selected lose their top tier rankings. My aesthetics have changed. Cyber is too dark, Serika too yellow (is it?). The right-left upper-lower case legend placement in the Osume winterglows niggles at my certainty and the lovely sculpted MTNU double shot PBT Darlings inspire lust, aided of course by that pre-order deadline inspired FOMO. I’m convinced, the Darlings are my darlings. I’m ready to click, but I just have to check one more set. And it happens again, the muted reds of the momo neko marshmallows steal my heart.

So, the next time your significant other(s) are infuriated that keyboards are stealing your heart and time and money, gently explain to them that though it appears to them incomprehensible and trivial, perhaps insane, it is transformative, and transformation is why we are here.

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