Hazard: High Performance!

Specs

• Keyboard: KBDFans KBD75 V2 (soldered)
• Case Color: Grey
• Plate Material: Brass
• Switch:
  • Alpha keys: Durock L4 Linear (Purple Clear 67g), springs lubricated with Krytox 205g0
    • Extra: Gateron Black drop-in replacements to fill in gaps
  • Modifier keys: Drop Halo True + KeBo Arctos (65g)
  • Extra (caps, esc): Kailh Box Jade
• Keycaps:
  • XDA Profile
  • PBT Dye-subliminated

Story

This board was a rather interesting one for me as it's both kind-of a well-designed build at the same time of being a mish-mash of thrown-together parts that somehow work really well together. That all being said, once it was finished, it instantly became my daily driver along with my absolute favourite board for gaming.

Pre-Research

By the point in time I started researching for my second board, I've already built three boards (my first board, my brother's board, and my sister-in-law's board), which gave me enough experience and confidence to try and build a board that's been highly personalized for my own tastes and typing habits. Of course, one may ask "Why build yourself another board when you've already built yourself one perfectly usable 65% board?", to which any keyboard enthusiast's response may result in laughter or comments of "oh my sweet summer child..."

In truth, I was simply wanting to have a 75% layout as when I play games, I started finding myself at a disadvantage by not being able to press F1, F5, F8, or backtick (`) without first holding Fn on the other side of the spacebar and activating a temporary layer. Well, that and also I wanted to have my spacebar give me a little more feedback so when I jump in a game, I know when I actuate the key, so I can measure the delay between actuation and action on screen. I also wanted a brass plate instead of aluminum because a slightly denser material results in a bit of a nicer sound (in my opinion). Additionally, I kind of also wanted a little more functionality and available layers on the board along with a little more transparent RGB so I can customize the aesthetics and-- and-- and...

So I wanted a new keyboard because I wanted a new keyboard. Fine, I admit it! But I decided that this was an opportunity for me to improve on everything that I liked in my previous board while adding on features that were custom tailored to me. And so I began my research to make a highly personalized board for myself...

Research

I took the time to analyze how I even typed in the first place. I actually noticed quite an interesting habit I've developed in that when typing normal sentences, I hold my right thumb high above the board as it ends up being largely unused in any given point in time. Additionally, I strictly use my left pinky to hold down the Shift key, but prefer to have a softer actuation feel on LShift and LCtrl when it comes to longer gaming sessions. Another thing I was thinking about was reducing the overall mass of the space button -- this also resulted in allowing two other buttons to take its place (which I later configured to activate various keyboard layers). This, along with many other considerations, resulted in me prototyping many different sorts of layouts with varying switch types. I had quite a few different switches on hand thanks to my previous builds along with my general curiousity and hanging out with a few other keyboard enthusiasts, so I was able to experiment a little to try and refine this design. The result: a very personalized switch layout that is custom-tailored to my typing style.

Build Process

Lubrication and Preparation

The build process of this board was rather experimental in essence. I had some keyswitches in mind, but overall wasn't too picky about lesser-pressed keys. So I ended up ordering some Durock Linears for the alpha keys, Arctos 65g's for modifier keys, and decided that Halo Trues were a lot smoother of a tactile feel, so those should be in place for the mod keys that I'd be pressing more often with my weaker fingers. This being so, I decided I wanted a little more resistance over mod keys that I'd press less during gaming or press with my thumb, so LWin, LAlt, and Space were all Arctos. Because these were already slightly lubed from the factory, I found that it only needed a very light greasing to get the feeling just right while the springs needed a generous amount of lube to reduce on pinging sounds. However, due to the fact that I was building this board after having just finished working on two TKL builds and one numpad build, I allowed myself to be a little more lazy and decided the factory lube was enough for the most part, only touching up on spring ping and select switches that I found were the least consistently lubed.

Evaluation

After having lubed and put a good majority of switches through my quality control tests (comparing one switch to another by feel and sound), I separated the switches from most favourable to least and started placing the most favourable ones on the left end of the board (where most of the keys would be for gaming) and some on the right (around the arrow cluster area) while scattering the less favourable randomly so overall the good would be balanced with the bad and I won't notice any major inconsistency with quality. And for the most part, that worked just perfectly -- any of the Arctos switches that felt a little less lubed and more scratchy were ones I put closer to the F9 to F12 area as those keys are used significantly less than F1 to F6.

Soldering

The soldering process was rather trivial as at this point, I've had quite a lot of experience with soldering keyboards. Not much else I feel I should speak about on this section

Wrapping Up

And so the finale, the keyboard comes together as soon as I open the box of keycaps and install everything. It was at this point that I noticed this particular set of keycaps didn't come with the "homing bumps" on the F and the J keys. While this is slightly unfortunate for someone like me who frequently types without looking at the keyboard, it didn't take too much time for me to just simply get used to placing my hands approximately where I needed them to be and start typing, adjusting my hand placement whenever needed. Additionally, this set didn't include the necessary keycaps for a split space-bar layout, so I decided to swap out the main space bar with two split bar pieces from the keycap set in my first build along with a slightly larger cap for the middle space key. This ended up working just perfectly for my needs.

While this ended up being a board of mis-matched parts from other builds, overall it turned out to be one of my favourite builds to date, simply with the amount of thought put into the board in general as well as the customization done to the switches and the layout overall. I really enjoyed the process and it gave me a lot of confidence to build more layouts taht are bold, unique, and unmistakenly built for one individual only that one individual. To be completely honest, this board is what got me excited to take on more custom projects and every time I look at it, I get the urge to work a little more on personalized electronics projects.

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