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.
