Sprucing up a Filco Majestouch and a Das Keyboard 4

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So I've been using this pair of Cherry MX equipped keyboards for years. The Filco Majestouch 2 Ninja (black; side-printed legends) is 14 years old; the Das Keyboard 4 Ultimate (black; no legends) is 10.

But they were looking a bit old and scruffy. In particular the keycaps were getting shiny and worn and unpleasant to type on. The UV coating on the Filco keyboard was wearing off. Both keyboards were full of dust and pet hair. The usual.

However the Das Keyboard's media dial was getting sticky - it was coated with that rubbery crap that designers of consumer electronics from 20 years ago loved to use. And its metal top plate also looked awful. It's supposedly anodized, but the front edge scratched within the first few weeks of ownership and looked like crap thereafter, so it really looks like paint to me.

But every key works perfectly on both keyboards - hooray for Cherry MX quality - so I didn't see the point of throwing these things out. I'm a writer, not a gamer, so I don't care about cheesy gimmicks like glowing disco lights or keys in random colours or ESC keys which look like a cat's ass. Plain Cherry MX Browns are perfect for me. So I thought I'd just tidy these things up.

Cleaning was easy enough - just unscrew the keyboards and brush them out, using liberal quantities of pressure from air cans. I then bought some generic keycaps from China since Filco doesn't sell replacement Ninja keycaps anymore. Specifically "womier" brand side-printed (ie: front printed) double-shot PBT caps. I figure they're worth a shot.

And so far they're fine. The font on the double-shot plastics is ugly and a bit crude compared to the white lettering of the Filco Ninja keys. But since the "womier" lettering plastic is white/translucent for backlighting purposes, the glyphs really aren't that visible on my unlit keyboards. They look sort of grey, which is fine. And since the caps are new they feel wonderful to the touch. I bought a few blank 1.25 ones so I didn't have to have "Win" on the front command keys.

I repainted the Das metal top plate using black car bumper paint, which I've used on other projects and holds up pretty well. Those irritating scratch marks are gone! The varnished "Das" logo is mostly gone - you can still see the raised text if you hold the keyboard at an angle - but I hardly care about that. The thing was a bit of a pain to reassemble owing to the routing of the PCB's ground wire, but easy enough once that was sorted.

I then stripped the sticky rubber coating off the Das multimedia wheel with isopropanol and paper towels. Messy, but easy. Then a few coats of bumper paint. I contacted Das to buy a replacement, but they won't sell them. Bah.

Done! Now, assuming the cheap keycaps hold up, I hope to get another decade of use out of these things. I had to throw out some plastic keycaps, but at least these things aren't joining the world's ewaste stream just yet...