Mechanical Keyboard, The Oak Edition
Introduction
In 2022 I became a member of the local Maker Space makersLink, which I highly recommend to all the makers in Linköping. I have done a couple of projects with my daughter, which are documented on fatotesa.se. The mechanical keyboard is the first non Fatotesa project. While hanging around the maker space, you get inspired and get all sorts of ideas and a couple of months ago, I thought it would be cool to build a mechanical keyboard with a wooden case.
The cost
At first I thought I could build the keyboard from scratch. After looking into that I realized it would be much more work than I was willing to invest in the project as well as much more expensive than I expected. The cost of all the parts purchased separately ended up being around 1500SEK.
| Item | Price |
|---|---|
| PCB board | 400SEK |
| Stabilizers | 150SEK |
| Keycaps | 400SEK |
| Switches | 250SEK |
| PCB foam | 100SEK |
| Shipping and Taxes | 350SEK |
| Total | 1650SEK |
I considered 1650SEK (~150USD) to be quite steep, especially considering that on black Friday one could get a full mechanical keyboard for under 300SEK (30USD).
Svive Triton Mini
I ended up buying a Svive Triton Mini for 299SEK (30USD) on black Friday. I knew nothing about the brand, but the keyboard has a PCB with a USB-C port, swappable RED switches and a Nordic layout and white keycaps. The case wasn’t great, but that was the part I was going to replace.
Here is how the keyboard looked:
And sounded:
The case
CNC
This was the first time I would use a CNC machine, so it took some time to learn how to use the machine and the software. I designed the case in Easel, which is what we use with our CNC machine a the space. It’s a simple, web based design editor that has a free and paid version. The free version has all the features I needed for this project.
I’ve published the Easel case design on Inventables.
Since this was my first CNC project I used MDF for prototyping and testing. It took me 3 revisions in MDF and 2 in oak to get a result I was happy with.
The final result
The looks:
The sound:
