I tend to use new hobbies or interests as an opportunity to build something. A new interest of mine is mechanical keyboards. After being exposed to the hobby by some co-workers, I dipped my toe in the waters with an inexpensive mechanical keyboard from Massdrop and was hooked.

I decided that I would make a custom keyboard case out of wood and assemble the rest from parts available to order. As you will see this journey is not through an unfamiliar land, I have seen similar landscapes before.

Case Materials

As it turned out I was having a very large cherry tree taken down in my back yard because of carpenter ants. I asked the tree removal company to leave a couple of straight sections around 2 feet long because I had a project for them. This is where the keyboard project starts, and like all great projects, it starts with a chainsaw.

To keep a log from splitting you need to cut it right down the middle, this allows the exterior and interior to shrink at different rates. If you don’t cut it down the length it will develop some sizable and uncontrolled splitting that will waste a good portion of the lumber.

The other preventative measure is paint the end grain (the portion of the log that the chainsaw is sitting on in the above photo). Any paint will do, it seals the end and prevents it from drying too quick and developing smaller cracks, which would also make potions of the lumber unusable. Now I have four 200 lb. chucks of wood. (yea!)

The next step is to mill the logs into lumber. Lumber is processed wood. The rough boards need to be oversized because you do lose quite a bit of material during the finishing of the material. When you are talking about rough sawn lumber it is always talked about in quarters, or quarters of an inch. A 6/4 board is 1 1/2 inches. I figured that would give enough working room for a nice case.

I do have access to a saw mill, I understand that isn’t a “normal” thing, but there are lots of people out there that own saw mills and will mill lumber for you for a small fee.

Once the boards are rough sawn, they need to be dried. This can be done in a basement or garage, but it would take quite a bit of time. Commercial lumber is what is called “kiln dried” this is basically just a hot dry room that speeds drying. It can also dried in a residential oven if the amount of lumber is small enough, there are lots of options. There is also quite a bit of information online on how to dry lumber.

However I also have access to a solar kiln, which is a great and environmental way to dry lumber (I know, also not a “normal” thing to have at your disposal). A solar kiln is just a green house that is small, well-sealed, and painted black to absorb more heat.

The lumber is now milled and stacked in the solar kiln, the process will take weeks to months depending on thickness of the boards and time of the year.

Components

I now have the lumber drying and have some time to look into the internal components.

The first main choice is how do I want the keys to be laid out. There are an overwhelming amount of layouts to choose from for keyboards. I settled on my requirements as follows:

Something bigger than the bare minimum size, 65% to give some flexibility. Easy to customize with some common configuration tools. USB-C for ease of adapting.

I looked quite a bit and decided on the WhiteFox keyboard .The folks at the Kono store were nice enough to put together a custom order of the WhiteFox kit that included the PCB, plate and stabilizers.

WhiteFox PCB

WhiteFox Plate

The next components, from bottom up, are the switches. There are also an overwhelming amount of choices and customization that can happen at this level.

Like I said in the beginning, I got a nice stock keyboard which got my toes wet in this whole field. That keyboard has “clicky” switches, and I like them. A colleague had Kailh Speed Bronze and I really liked the quickness, but it was a little “too” quick so I settled a set of Gold, which are a little slower (stiffer). Be careful because the prices of switches can vary by an order of magnitude depending on where you buy them. I found them for around $0.35, but you can easily pay much much more.

Kailh Speed Bronze

The last major piece of the puzzle are the keycaps. Since I didn’t feel the white keyset that are stock to the WhiteFox would blend well with my case I was going to have to find something else.

There are all kinds of places to do obtain these, but I monitored Massdrop mechanical keyboard community for a keycap set I thought would work and landed on the Canvas keycap set. The color of the key caps seems like they would work nicely with the final look of aged cherry.

Ordering from Massdrop can be a pretty slow method (mine ended up taking around 5 months because of manufacturing issues) and your results may vary.

A small after thought was to get a cable to fit in with the color scheme. My custom USB-C cable was ordered from mechcables.com. Mechcables sells totally made to order USB cables. There are so many options that you can choose from. I landed here after looking online for a long time, a little bit more money but it is perfect match for my colors.

Assembly

Okay, up to this point I have ordered all the major components and now have to start the design, construction and assembly process.

First need to come up with a decent design that makes use of the natural wood.

Second I will have to build the actual case with any decorative elements.

Finally I will assemble the electronic components and install them in the case. I can’t do this earlier because I need the plate for the case construction.

For the design I was initially inspired by some of the Japanese art of cherry trees. However after receiving the keycaps, they just weren’t “fluid” enough to match the uber-natural aspects of a cherry tree, so I settled on something a bit more geometric and sparse.

To accomplish the actual design in the wood, I thought if I can do some inlay of a colored epoxy on the surface of the case it could be quite striking.

Rough concept of the case

To produce the blank, I roughed out the blank and created the rounded edges by first roughing the shape on a band saw then carefully finishing the shape with a sander. To achieve the taper, the blank was send through the planer with a block two sided taped to the edge. This raised the edge up making it thiner. Here is the rough blank:

I then got a short template-following bit and routed a shallow recess for the plate. The template was just a square hole in a piece of plywood that was the same size as the aluminum plate.

A template-following router bit has the bearing at the top so that it cuts the same pattern as the template without an offset. This has the advantage of being able to cut one level down and that then becomes the template for the next level, which allows you to cut down a very controlled depth.

After the top was routed, I taped some insets to the same template to offset the bit so that it would route a smaller hole and routed that to allow for the PCB to fit. This allowed me to add the keycaps and solder the switches and quickly assemble the keyboard!

The next steps are all about finish. To test some of my ideas I took a scrap piece of the same cherry and carved in some designs with a Dremel tool. I then mixed the epoxy resin with a brown mica power additive and poured it in the carving. Once it was cured I sanded it down and here is the result.

It was an accident that I left the spaces between the lines, which make it look like a shadow of branches. Two things I learned: I am going to need to be more careful with the application and I can’t go too narrow or the epoxy doesn’t fill the hole.

There really isn’t much after this. I held my breath and took the plunge. I just carved something in the top of the case. It turned out pretty well which made me second guess if I should fill it at all. I decided to fill it because if I didn’t I would never know what it looked like.

Last I filled the design with resin, sanded the heck out of it and finished it with WaterLox. WaterLox is great, it makes wood look very deep and rich. It is a type of tung oil, which generally is a good choice.

Here it is on my desk at work:

Conclusion

It took me just about one year from start to finish on this project, most of it just waiting for parts or lumber to dry.

I would do a few things differently next time. The WhiteFox keyboard was nice to do it this time, but it isn’t ideally suited for use in a wood case. The clearances are designed for a different material. I had some warpage in the keyboard due to planing from one side, a better jig to handle flipping the board for each pass would be better. I have a better understanding of inlays now, and would think about that more from the beginning.

I am already starting to think of my next board. I think I might design the PCB this time around…