buckling spring with cherry on top

[ramnes]

Awesome, looking forward to this.

[Hypersphere]

PM sent.

[matt3o]

they are here!

[Hypersphere]

Excellent. Expect PM.

[Muirium]

Mwah ha ha! Of all the combinations of adapters out there, these are the ones I have the best use for. So many MX caps, so many IBMs!

[Hypersphere]

Be careful of having your workshop raided, matt3o! Those stems look like center-fire shell casings for an all-polymer weapon.

[matt3o]

the problem that I see now is that the texture of 3d printed items is very rough while the sliders need to be super smooth and glossy ("slider"... your know). I'll try with some lube.

I'll post more pictures in the coming days.

[Muirium]

Fingers crossed for you!

[Madhias]

That looks great! The remaining question will be the stabilized keys, for whole MX sets to use. If this doesn't work out it will be great adapters for novelty keycaps! Or somebody mixes up IBM caps with Cherrys or whatever...

[chzel]

Beautiful!
If it is ABS of something that reacts to acetone, you could try "acetone vapor smoothing", basically you expose the part to acetone vapor and the vapor melts the surface a bit and smooths out any ridges and texture.

[alinh]

Whoa.. this would look great on an IBM

[matt3o]

just a quick update.

unfortunately the first prototype didn't completely work. it is actually more difficult than I initially thought, there's very little room for errors and unfortunately 3d printing material shrinks quite a bit, so it's hard to make a 3d model.

anyway I'll give it another shot next week.

[Muirium]

So it came out too small? Mind telling us (or even better showing us with pictures or a video) what effect that has? Mistakes can be just as informative as success. I imagine it probably doesn't slide in the barrel right, wiggling around way too much, but my mental model could always use more data.

Guessing the MX mount came out right, as you're experienced with those. But, again, 3D printing shrinkage isn't something I have a handle on, so who knows.

[matt3o]

Sure I'll take some pictures (later today or tomorrow). I made 4 prototypes in various materials, each material shrinks differently, so basically some are too tight and don't slide correctly, others are too loose and wobbles.

The MX stem pretty much works, but the cap sticks too much out of the barrel, I probably have to make a deeper stem, but probably the profile that is going to work best is SA.

[Muirium]

SA is the one most of us are after (says me, not at all biased…) to get that classic beamspring spherical style on buckling spring where we want it.

[beltet]

Awesome work! I'm super exited by this. SA's on my IBM M 122 would be a dream!

[7bit]

Ideally, we find a plastic manufacturer that does these adapters for us. 3D-printing isn't really the way to go.

It would be great to have my own keys on my new kishwaster!


Thanks a lot for trying this for real!

[kalrand]

How did the second batch work out?

[vivalarevolución]

The only question I have is what profile of MX mount key caps will work best with those curved barrel plates of buckling spring keyboards? These uniform buckling spring key caps work great as they are.

[Muirium]

DSA is my guess. The lower the better. They will be riding high on adapters already.

[matt3o]

I'm aiming at SA actually, but shapeways is particularly slow this time of the year...

[Muirium]

Aim for SA, and if you miss, DSA is still reachable. Good plan.

[Khers]

My gut feeling is that an all row 3 SA (such as the Nuclear Data-set) BS-keyboard would be absolutely awesome!

[matt3o]

My gut feeling is that an all row 3 SA (such as the Nuclear Data-set) BS-keyboard would be absolutely awesome!

that's the plan

[Khers]

My gut feeling is that an all row 3 SA (such as the Nuclear Data-set) BS-keyboard would be absolutely awesome!

that's the plan

That is VERY good news!

[Madhias]

All row 3 SA will be then 'normal' because of the curved plate - but what about SA with rows? Row 1 must be even more curved then! I used a few months now a SSK at work, and coming back last week to DSA felt ... wrong. But after 2-3 days, DSA was feeling normal again. Especially the difference between IBM Model M and DSA is big!

Do you know yet about compatibility of more than 1U caps, matt3o, like SHIFT or RETURN?

[modology]

Cool. I have lots of model M and MX caps dying to try this out. Any more photos of the prototype ?

[fkeidjn]

Looking at the shape of the keycaps for the Model M (http://deskthority.net/workshop-f7/keyc ... t9847.html), perhaps SA row 1 upside down could work? Or DCS row 4?

[Redmaus]

I really want this too, but notice that ibm enters are not centered so no modifiers at all.

[Vizir]

Any update?