- Have fun building something
- Improve my soldering skills
- For the first time, after years of inept fumbling, I managed to complete a soldering project without burning myself.
- Get a nifty looking ergonomic keyboard
- Improve my typing skills by reinforcing good habits
- I have always been a "semi-touch-typer;" I can mostly touch-type but I have some really bad habits in terms of finger positioning. I have tried to correct this by consciously typing the "right way" but the habit is too deep. By moving to a keyboard where some of my bad habits are actually impossible, I have been able to eliminate them.
I like a satiny finish on wood, so I disregarded the instructions recommendation of lacquer and decided to wax the wood parts. This is, in the woodworking community, regarded as a Bad Decision because wax is a finish that has a lot of tradeoffs. In particular, it isn't very durable. However, I am not overly concerned with durability of the finish. Unlike a kitchen table or other surface, I won't touch the wooden parts very frequently, since my hands will be on the keys.
Four coats of wax yields a smooth satiny finish that looks quite nice with the porous wood. However, I neglected to consider how the wax would impact the rubber feet that go on the bottom of the case. Result: they don't stick well. Now I have them superglued on.
If I were to do it again knowing what I do now I would not do the wax finish, but either:
- Shellac
- Spray lacquer
Straightforward enough. A "third-hand" tool to hold the board in place is helpful. Not much to say about this, take your time and ensure that your joints are good. I got everything to work the first time.
If I were to do it again, I might consider going with Cherry switches instead of the ALPS included in the kit. With Cherry you get more choices in terms of keycaps (more on that later) and the two "sideways" switches in the middle will be easier to put in. That said, I quite like the ALPS switches. They were one of the things that drew me to the Atreus, since my previous keyboard was a Matias Mini Tactile Pro.
My two major diversions here were keycaps and edge-binding.
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Edge Binding
I'm a big fan of the aesthetic of Danelectro Guitars, which it turns out are guitars made of layers of plywood or cheap softwood (depending on when the example in question was made). To hide their edges, they used a textured tape. I found someone on eBay who sold the tape, asked him to cut me a length with width of a 1/2 inch. It went on nicely and holds well so far. I didn't do any special preparation to the edges, so I was a bit concerned about how well it would stick.
Update, September 25, 2017: The binding has come off. It started peeling off the top right corner a while ago, but always stuck back on. However, this morning at work the flap just wouldn't stay put. I peeled it off. It was actually stuck on quite well to most of the keyboard, so this seems to have been a surface prep issue. My guess is there's some wax on that edge.
I may use this binding tape again on a future build with no wax (currently in progress). Stay tuned for those results.
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Keycaps
It's hard to find interesting ALPS keycaps. All the neat sets you see are only available for Cherry switches. The Atreus kit comes with blank keycaps, but I wanted to spice it up a little.
I went to a vintage computing festival a few weeks before starting my build, and I still had visions of those old keyboards in my mind. I looked up which manufacturers used ALPS switches back then thinking I would just buy an old keyboard that looked nice, and pull the caps.
Lo and behold, Apple was a prolific user of ALPS switches in the '80s and since I currently use an iMac it seemed appropriate to go with those. So I got enough keycaps to cover the top 3 rows of the board and used the blank caps on the bottom row, for which it would be hard to find labeled analogs.
Pretty cool, huh? I also added a coily USB cable as the finishing touch. I tested to make sure that the act of stretching the coil wouldn't pull the cable out of the socket, and it seems good so far. Let's hope it doesn't pull out, because then I'll have to rip off all my tape to get back inside and reattach it.
As far as typing goes, it was a relatively quick adjustment for me. Now, after about 2 weeks using it daily at work and at home, I prefer it over any other keyboard. There are just a lot of little handy things about it. Overall I'm glad I built it. It was a very fun project and I can't recommend it highly enough.
This post written in Emacs on my Atreus, June 3, 2017