Any chance of us getting wood blanks or molds or casts (/reverse molds) or other things that aren’t usable so that we can either use them as a reference or take them part/tinker with?
Trust me when I say I have no desire to make my own kb, but I’d like to give it a go at making my own wood enclosures. I’m thinking maybe walnut, cherry, oak, purpleheart, or whatever the wood shop has in stock.
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I know the other thread on stained enclosures answers the CAD file but I didn’t want to thread jack so I started this one for wood enclosures but it can be PCBs, stands, etc.
On a different note, what are your thoughts on offering “kits”? All the parts but not assembled, hopefully you’d supply instructions - screw this here, solder here, this goes here, etc.
If we were making this stuff at home, it’d be very doable.
But the way mass production works, especially for outsourced stuff in China, we don’t have those parts.
There are no casts The molds are machined from CAD drawings, using either a CNC or EDM milling.
If we got wood blanks from the wood factory, we’d have to…talk them into it and pay them for them. And right now, we’re working hard to make sure they understand they can’t give us imperfect workpieces. (More on that in the next backer update.)
For the wood - My plan is to distribute STEP files. The models themselves have bounced between SolidWorks, PRO/E and Fusion 360. I’d really prefer to have the canonical models in something open and parametric, but, OpenSCAD was a little anemic the last time I tried and FreeCAD was too space-alien for me to be able to work with.
Kits, “maybe someday” - The economics, logistics, QC, packaging and import legalities are all different from doing this for finished keyboards. There are other keyboards we may offer as kits if we live through this experience.