junior week mar. 18, 2026

no school friday. slightly shorter week as a result.

keyboard updates

i'm officially over the resin printer failing my keycap prints. i'm not even going to rant about it for a third time—i'll just say the keycaps are (hopefully) printing now.

the "paint" experiment on my keycaps wasn't the best because i forgot to wash them before curing. however, some of the super thin layers were easy to remove and actually led to a clean finish, while the thicker layers required a bit of surgical cutting.

keycap coating comparison

left side is the thin layer that's been removed, right side is the thicker layer partially removed.

i'm probably just going to try repainting all of them properly and hope it works out.

waterjetting the plate

with keycaps (fingers crossed) printing, i started working on the physical plate. jonas and mr. christy taught me how to use the waterjet, so we cut my piece out of polycarbonate. it ended up exactly how i wanted, though it had a few "dings" and burrs. i grabbed a deburring tool and got to work.

polycarbonate plate burrs

you can see little "strings" standing out. i deburred most of them.

before testing my plate, mr. christy had a task from metal fab to cut some "donuts" out of scrap metal. jonas modeled them up and guided me as i set up the waterjet to perform the cut.

here is the current progress on the keyboard assembly:

it actually sounds pretty nice with the polycarbonate plate. potential audio file in the next blog post?