I haven't meant to keep "radio silence" on my Chordite keyboard
experiments. I just haven't had much success lately. I tried using
Shapelock, but didn't have
much success. Mind you, Shapelock is great stuff. It's just not good
for making something repeatably the same shape.
- Tried making a keyboard by
grabbing soft shapelock and molding it into the shape I wanted, and stuffing
keys into the right places. The keys didn't take the correct angles.
Couldn't keep all 7 keys pointing in the right direction at the right
time. You can soften parts of a shapelock part, but it's annoyingly
tedious.
- Tried building up the keyboard using bits of shapelock, molding them
and sticking them to the keyboard by reheating parts of it. The parts
eventually stuck together, but I had to do some serious reheating with
hot water. Had no good mounts for the keys.
- Tried making a mold for the shapelock part out of polymer clay. That
worked okay, and I was able to make a reasonably thin piece of shapelock
locked in the right shape. But I didn't think clearly about how I was
then going to place the switches: on little bits of PC board (the switches
line up with the .1" x .1" spacing of the holes), or by cutting holes in
the shapelock. So I had a nice bit of plastic with no way to mount the
switches to it.
I'm headed down a different tack now. Turns out that both a CD and a CD
jewel box are the correct thickness (1.2mm == approx 0.50") to hold a Marquardt
keyswitch. So now I'm looking at cutting holes in a CD jewel box to hold
the keys, and cutting slots in it to bend it into the correct shape. After
a few experiments, I've gotten good at using a Dremel(tm) Rotozip(tm) cutter
to cut holes. They hold the keyswitches quite securely. The prototype will
have wires soldered to the keys, but in production, I'll use a flex pc
board.
posted at: 02:39 |
path: /chordite |
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