Introduction

I’ve been a big fan of mechanical keyboards for a while now. I’ve a few keyboards with PCBs and made hot swappable boards but never attempted to build a hand wired keyboard. I was looking for something to do in terms of projects as I waited for my new MSLA printer, and take a rest from messing around with my MK3S. After doing some research and looking back into hand wired keyboards I decided to build my own and decided to write a short and simplified guide on how to build one. This will be pretty concise and not explain every aspect of hand wiring, but will cover the basics so that you can wire one up yourself.

Here are a few guides that I took gleaned information from:

Hand-wiring a custom Keyboard - Matt3o.com

Handwired Keyboard Build Log - Masterzen's Blog

A Modern handwiring Guide - Stronger, Cleaner, Easier

These guides are a lot more comprehensive than mine, they cover why and how things work, which is great but there is a lot of information crammed into those guides and I decided to create this guide as a more simplified version of those. This guide will explain to you as concisely as possible all that needs to be done to get a board running. The point of this guide is very much to show you how to get from point A to point B. If you want to learn more about why or how it all works, I recommend checking out Matt3o’s guide as it is very in-depth or any of the other ones I’ve linked above.

S.C.R.A.P. Board

I decided to call this the S.C.R.A.P. Board, which stands for Super Cheap Re-purposed Additional Parts Board. I tried to build this board for the least amount of money possible. I have a lot of left over things like switches, key caps, and just parts that have been sitting around in a ziplock bag, so I decided to use them to practice building a 40% Planck board. The reason why I decided to build a 40% as oppose to a 60% or something bigger is because I wanted to be able to quickly build this and at the same time I wanted to 3D print the case and plate quickly. My 3D printed can accommodate a 40% plate and case without having to print multiple pieces. The other reason being that since it’s only a 40%, the amount of parts required is limited and if I did make any mistakes or ruin anything it won’t be a humongous lost. The board didn’t cost me very much because I already have the majority of the parts, but in reality, all you need are the diodes, switches, magnet wire, keycaps, and the Proton-C. Yes, it could be possibly cheaper to just buy a Planck Rev.6 and EOTW case, but if you have spare parts, this is a fun way to use them.

Parts and Tools

This is a list of tools and parts that I needed to do this project, all the Amazon links are affiliated and I earn a small percentage when items are purchased through these links, this really just goes to helping me keep the site up. You don’t need to buy anything if you already have the majority of these things:

Tools:

Parts:

Prepping