A journal of my first mechanical keyboard build.

Part zero

Introduction.

I thought it might be interesting for me to write about my experience building my first mechanical keyboard. I have no first hand knowledge of building anything, so I’m learning as I go along here. Please be patient with me.

As I embarked on this journey I scoured the internet for all the information I could find on the obscure topic of building your own mechanical keyboard. There is a lot of information to be found if you are willing to sacrifice a lot of time on Reddit, and more precisely the sub reddit that is called r/MechanicalKeyboards. My intention with this series of posts is to help sift through the information and gather some of the important information in one helpful guide. I’m not claiming to be an expert on the subject at hand, quite the opposite in fact. I’m simply documenting my own building process and hoping it may be of some help to someone else.

As I progress with my build I hope I can inspire and/or help some other “noob” on his or her journey to the elusive endgame keyboard. I know going in to this project that this isn’t my own endgame. I already have another PCB on order from OLKB. and I have a feeling this isn’t going to end well for my wallet…

I might as well mention that I’m not a native English speaker so please pardon any misspellings or strange phrasings.

Some of the topics I’m planing to write about are keycaps, switches, staggered or ortholinear, LEDs, soldering, artisans, programing your keyboard and even wrist wrests. I’m sure there are more topics I’ll come up with during the build.

This is my current setup. I’m using a Vortex race3 to type this (I’ll give you my thoughts on it later). I’m a musician, music teacher and songwriter and thats the reason for all the strange devices on my desk. That is also the reason I stumbled in to this world of mechanical keyboards. I was locking for a device I could program to execute my keyboard shortcuts in Logic Pro X. Somewhere along the way in my search for a programmable keyboard I saw a picture of a Planck. I was immediately drawn to the symmetrical layout of the keys on the keyboard (just like on my Linnstrument). It immediately just looked right to me. Natural. A lot of research later and I’m sitting here waiting for the last package to arrive. The last pieces before I can start to build my very own ortholinear Planck keyboard.