Learn how to construct one of the best keyboard on this planet

The time period “endgame,” amongst keyboard lovers, is form of a operating gag. Endgame is while you lastly dial in your good structure, case, options, switches, and keycaps, so you’ll be able to cease noodling round with elements and get on with no matter it’s you really use the keyboard for — work, presumably. Then a number of months later you see one thing shiny and begin over.

Within the seek for endgame, most of us must compromise someplace — often time or cash. Typically the factor you’re in search of simply doesn’t exist.

However what for those who didn’t must compromise? What for those who had the time, the endurance, the artistic imaginative and prescient, and the money to create your endgame keyboard from scratch? And I imply actually from scratch, from the cable to the switches and stabilizers.

That is the way you get the Seneca, the primary keyboard from Norbauer & Co. It has a plasma-oxide-finished milled aluminum chassis, a stable brass switchplate, customized capacitive switches, one of the best stabilizers on this planet (additionally customized), spherical-profile keycaps with appropriately retro-looking centered legends, zero backlighting, and a totally flat typing angle.

It weighs seven kilos and prices $3,600.

You might need some questions, like: Why is it $3,600? Who would make a keyboard that’s that costly? And is it even any good?

I’ve spent the last couple of months typing on an early Seneca, and the reply to the final query is the best. Sure. It’s unimaginable. It’s actually the nicest keyboard you should purchase. The construct high quality is astonishing, the Topre-style switches are higher than Topre’s, the stabilizers are higher than anybody’s, and the keyboard is gorgeous and a pleasure to kind on. The Seneca is a real technical accomplishment.

The reply to the primary two questions is Ryan Norbauer.

Ryan Norbauer is well-known within the keyboard neighborhood for his aftermarket housings, however the Seneca is his first ready-to-type board. To listen to him inform it, it’s the most recent logical step in a decadelong course of to construct his personal endgame keyboard, of which the enterprise — Norbauer & Co. — is an nearly unintentional byproduct.

Norbauer grew up in West Virginia within the Nineteen Nineties, watching Star Trek: The Subsequent Technology and absorbing each its retro-modern aesthetic and its imaginative and prescient of an egalitarian, post-scarcity world. It was additionally the start of the non-public computing period and the daybreak of the web. The pc represented an escape from the world as it’s, a window into the way forward for Star Trek, of Epcot, of the concept a extra linked world could be a greater one.

The Seneca represents Norbauer’s try and make the very best laptop keyboard, to his personal requirements and tastes, with out worrying about value — the form of keyboard that appears and seems like we keep in mind keyboards feeling, again once we thought computer systems have been a good suggestion.

“A giant half for me of the attract of keyboards is the connection to my childhood nostalgia about being actually enthusiastic about computing,” Norbauer tells me through video chat. So the Seneca is huge, chunky, and has a normal tenkeyless structure, fairly than one thing extra compact or unique, as a result of that’s what he’s at all times used, and what brings again that feeling. “I really feel like I can extra authentically make an optimum keyboard if the primary one I make is precisely the one which I would like.”

Norbauer has a behavior of wanting issues that don’t exist, then determining the right way to construct them from scratch. About 20 years in the past, he received an concept for a relationship web site. “I didn’t have any cash in any respect. I dropped out of a PhD program and I simply had this concept for an organization I needed to start out and I couldn’t rent anybody to code it for me. So I’m like, ‘Okay, I suppose I simply must learn to code.’”

He spent six months coding for 14 hours a day; this received him an internet site, a startup, and tendonitis. Fixing the tendonitis concerned adopting correct typing kind (wrists straight, arms hovering over the keyboard like a pianist’s). Looking for a extra comfy keyboard finally despatched him down the trail of an obsession.

The relationship web site led to 2 extra startups. Promoting all three startups in 2010 gave him the money and time to discover new pursuits: at first, studying some industrial design expertise so he might make Star Trek prop replicas. It additionally led him to Topre keyboards.

By 2014, he was utilizing a modified Topre Realforce 87u keyboard in an aftermarket aluminum housing. He was additionally designing a Star Trek-inspired keycap set. Like most aftermarket keycaps, it labored with Cherry MX-style mechanical switches; Topre boards have a distinct keycap mount. So he couldn’t use his Star Trek keycaps on his favourite keyboard.

However then Cooler Grasp got here out with the NovaTouch, which had Topre switches however labored with common keycaps. Norbauer received one, however its low cost plastic housing didn’t really feel proper. He couldn’t discover anybody to make him an aluminum housing for it. “So I simply stated, ‘Fuck it, I’ll determine it out myself.’”

He designed a housing and discovered sufficient machining to make a prototype on a WWII-era milling machine. As soon as he was happy with the design, he discovered a producer and launched a small group buy on a keyboard discussion board and requested if some other Topre diehards needed one, to cowl the prices of creating one for himself.

He figured it was a one-time factor. “It was by no means meant to be a enterprise, however individuals simply saved asking me to make increasingly, and the factor form of snowballed by itself.” He did a number of extra rounds of the case finally dubbed the Norbatouch, in a number of new colours, together with a beige to go with his now officially licensed Star Trek keycaps. Then, as a result of individuals saved asking, he began making housings for different Topre keyboards.

There was the Norbaforce, for Realforce tenkeyless keyboards, and the Heavy-6 and Heavy-9, for the Leopold FC660C and FC980C, respectively. And in 2020, there was the Heavy Grail, his hottest housing, for the Joyful Hacking Keyboard.

Every was an opportunity to refine his aesthetic and his manufacturing functionality, and to experiment with totally different supplies (metal, titanium, milled polycarbonate, copper) and finishes (sharpening, bead-blasting, anodizing, powdercoating, cerakote, electroplating, even verdigris).

However they’re nonetheless solely housings, not the keyboards themselves; to finish them, you continue to must shuck a $200-plus keyboard from its plastic shell and stick it into the Norbauer housing. Making housings for different firms’ keyboards put him on the mercy of their provide chains and design choices. The NovaTouch was discontinued a number of months earlier than his first batch of casings was prepared; provide of Leopold’s keyboards was unpredictable even earlier than the corporate stopped making them.

He additionally needed extra management over the opposite points of the board, and he needed one thing to supply individuals who just like the Norbauer aesthetic however aren’t up for purchasing a keyboard, cracking it open, voiding the guarantee, and transplanting the heart into a brand new case.

After I first emailed Norbauer in late 2018, he was already speaking about constructing a ready-to-type keyboard — one thing individuals might decide up and revel in immediately. “I didn’t know precisely what that may appear to be, and I actually didn’t know the way arduous it could be to get to that time. If I did, I most likely by no means would have undertaken it.”

He made a prototype utilizing off-the-shelf elements — normal MX-compatible switches and stabilizers — then scrapped it. There are already dozens of firms making customized keyboards.

As a substitute, he determined to create the factor he’s needed all alongside: a keyboard with a heavy steel chassis and his personal retrofuturistic aesthetic, with the snappy tactile suggestions of a Topre-like capacitive dome change and compatibility with the large world of aftermarket keycaps.

He employed {an electrical} engineering agency to design the PCB, which he figured could be the toughest half, since Topre change clones are fairly straightforward to return by. That took a few 12 months, on and off. “After which I spotted, ‘Shit, I suppose I’ve to make all the opposite stuff that goes with it.’ And that took about 5 years.”

Someplace alongside the road, the challenge become a deliberate train in making one of the best keyboard he probably can, no matter value. “It was a type of issues the place my ambitions simply form of spiraled uncontrolled.”

For instance: Topre switches really feel nice to kind on, however they are usually wobbly on the high — comprehensible for one thing sitting on high of a rubber dome — and keycaps usually find yourself barely crooked. He needed a barely deeper typing sound, and he needed correct compatibility with MX-style keycaps. It’s not sufficient to swap the slider for one with the plus-sign -shaped MX stem, like different firms do; you even have to revamp the housings, or the keycaps simply find yourself slamming into them.

He figured he might do higher. His first prototypes sounded nice, however they have been simply as wobbly as Topre. His second design had tighter tolerances, so it wobbled much less, however it sounded worse. He added extra materials to get a deeper sound. Every revision required one other (costly) spherical of injection-molded tooling as he looked for one of the best mixture of really feel and sound.

By the fourth revision — those within the Seneca — the switches don’t look very similar to Topre. He redesigned the housings to keep away from interference with MX-style keycaps, and added a 3rd alignment leg to the sliders; they don’t rotate as simply within the housings, so the keycaps aren’t crooked. They’ve the excessive tactile bump and clean downstroke of Topre switches, with a deeper sound. There’s a silicone ring for upstroke damping, and a gasket the place they press towards the underside of the brass switchplate.

Whereas he was engaged on the switches, he tackled the stabilizer problem. Stabilizers are the mechanisms that hook up with lengthy keys, just like the house bar, shift, enter, and backspace, and ensure the entire key strikes downward on the similar fee no matter the place it’s pressed. They work, however they sound horrible, until you discover some solution to cease the wire from rattling within the housing, the slider from slamming into the PCB, and the varied plastic elements from rubbing collectively. Normally this includes some mixture of lubes, greases, and bodily damping. Tuning the stabilizers is essentially the most time-consuming and difficult a part of most keyboard builds.

“The unique plan was to make use of hand-lubed MX stabilizers as a result of it’s such a normal factor, proper? However I believed it simply could be attention-grabbing to see if there was some solution to remedy this downside with out requiring all of it to be based mostly on lubrication to dissipate the sound.”

Norbauer desires the Seneca to be one of the best keyboard on this planet, so he has no selection. He has to make one of the best stabilizers on this planet.

Creating the Seneca’s stabilizers took a number of years, a bunch of false begins, and, in his phrases, a “private money bazooka.” His first try, totally on his personal, resulted in what he thought-about a “90 p.c resolution” — higher than something in the marketplace, with out lube. However 90 p.c there may be 10 p.c not there. He began over.

He labored with a firm that specializes in kinematics to develop a very new stabilizer mechanism. Really, they got here up with two new stabilizer mechanisms. The primary is a compliant-beam design that’s considerably higher than present stabilizers in addition to his first prototype. It’s a lot much less susceptible to rattle or tick. It’s as near good as you will get with out completely rethinking how stabilizers work. The second design is a sophisticated collection of pin-joint hinges with 5 instances as many elements as a normal stabilizer. It’s hideously costly to provide and each time consuming and fiddly to assemble, however it’s higher.

The Seneca makes use of the second design.

That is illustrative of Norbauer’s basic method, which is that fixing technical issues is far more attention-grabbing than attempting to attenuate manufacturing prices. On the Seneca, that’s taken to a deliberate excessive. “Our purpose is simply to make this good, and that’s all that issues. And so each time there was a department, I used to be like, ‘Let’s go together with the rightest solution to do it and rattling the prices.’ And that has been the philosophy of this board.”

The Seneca’s case is milled from stable aluminum, with an MAO plasma-oxide finish; he needed to arrange an organization in China with a view to supply it. There’s a heat grey possibility referred to as travertine, which has a matte, barely speckled stonelike look, and a lighter grey referred to as oxide, which appears to be like a bit like concrete. They’re each clean to the contact. (There’s additionally a matte black model, which I haven’t seen in individual, and an almost $8,000 titanium possibility, which ditto.)

The switchplate is milled from stable brass, for the acoustic properties, after which chrome-plated for aesthetics. Aluminum would have been cheaper, lighter, and simpler to mill, however brass absorbs sound higher, so brass it’s. The PCB accommodates a galvanic isolation chip to mitigate the extremely unlikely occasion {that a} rogue energy provide sends a blast of electrical energy from the pc’s USB port into the keyboard. The cable has an obscenely costly Lemo connector on the keyboard facet. Lemo connectors are safer than USB and Norbauer thinks they’re cool, and funky is healthier, and it’s his keyboard.

The keycaps are the least customized a part of the board. Not that he wouldn’t have designed a brand new keycap profile for the Seneca, you perceive. He regarded into it, however within the meantime MTNU got here out. MTNU’s spherical high surfaces and centered legends have precisely the aesthetic Norbauer was in search of, and it’s extra comfy to kind on than different retro-looking keycap profiles like SA or MT3. All he needed to do was decide the colours.

Every Seneca is assembled by hand in Norbauer’s storage in Los Angeles, at a fee of 1 or two per day, by both Norbauer or Taeha Kim — aka Taeha Sorts, keyboard influencer and bespoke keyboard builder turned Norbauer & Co. worker/investor.

The stabilizers alone take Taeha an hour or two per keyboard, together with a step the place he takes a tiny reamer to every set to make the pin holes massive sufficient for the (precision-ground) pins to slot in, these tolerances being tighter than could be managed with injection molding alone.

(I’m referring to Norbauer by his final title and Taeha by his first as a result of that’s how they’re every recognized within the keyboard neighborhood.)

“Typically, if it’s not reamed fairly sufficient, you’ll get slightly little bit of sluggishness within the match between these elements. And the friction throughout the entire system is cumulative. So you probably have slightly little bit of sluggishness in a number of locations, you don’t know till you’ve put the entire thing collectively that the stabilizer itself is slightly bit sluggish,” says Norbauer. When that occurs, they must disassemble the keyboard, repair the stabilizer, and begin over.

The cumulative impact of all these decisions is a keyboard that has each extremely excessive upfront prices and excessive per-unit prices. Really, it sounds so costly I ask Norbauer if he’s earning money on the Seneca, even at $3,600 a pop.

The response is an instantaneous “Not but! Oh God.”

“I imply, positively once I promote this primary batch, and doubtless the second batch, and effectively into the third or fourth, I’d not have recouped my R&D prices on it. And it’s an attention-grabbing query. So, I’m unhealthy at enterprise.”

For more often than not he was making aftermarket housings, he says, the enterprise wasn’t notably worthwhile. “My purpose has at all times been mainly to interrupt even whereas additionally doing actually cool R&D stuff. I’m not personally shedding a ton of cash. However the Heavy Grail, for instance, was a very talked-about providing. Individuals actually beloved it and it offered far more than I ever thought it could. And that helped bootstrap and fund the Seneca, however one hundred pc of what would have been revenue went into that.”

Whilst he was transitioning Norbauer & Co. from an organization that sells housings to 1 that sells keyboards, he saved operating into the truth that he doesn’t like most points of operating a enterprise. This isn’t an enormous downside while you’re promoting a number of dozen DIY housings at a time to Topre lovers as a self-funding interest. In case you’re attempting to construct a enterprise that sells absolutely customized luxurious keyboards, it’d turn out to be an issue.

Final 12 months, when the Seneca was principally developed and he was staring down a mountain of logistical duties, he offered just below half the corporate to the funding agency Tiny, run by an previous acquaintance. The association leaves Norbauer with a majority stake and complete artistic management — he’s nonetheless the CEO — and lets him give attention to growing keyboards whereas different individuals deal with the “earning money” a part of it.

Different individuals, on this case, is Caleb Bernabe, Norbauer & Co.’s govt in residence. In a 12,000-word blog post announcing the sale, Norbauer writes, “He acts basically as our COO, however his job description is mainly doing all of the issues that I hate — a skillset at which he inexplicably however admirably excels.”

The Seneca gained’t make you a greater author — or a quicker one, to my chagrin (ask me what number of deadlines I blew scripting this piece). I, personally, can’t justify spending $3,600 on a keyboard; I don’t know too many individuals who might. However after spending a pair months with the Seneca, I can see why somebody would.

This can be a keyboard nerd’s luxurious keyboard. That Norbauer spent half a decade and a whole lot of 1000’s of {dollars} growing it’s wild; that he really pulled it off is even wilder. The switches and stabilizers alone are an incredible achievement, and proper now the Seneca is the one place they stay.

Norbauer has spent a decade constructing credibility within the keyboard neighborhood and amassing a loyal (and well-heeled) fan base. He could make a $3,600 keyboard and be fairly certain that sufficient individuals will purchase it that he could make it make sense.

Not that he desires to promote a lot of keyboards. The truth is, not promoting quite a lot of keyboards is a part of the plan. He offered 50 of them final summer time, sight unseen, in a non-public preorder for a gaggle of earlier purchasers — paying beta testers, basically. Proper now he’s promoting one other 150 or so “First Version” keyboards, to be delivered in late summer time. Then he’ll most likely do one other batch. And one other one after that. However he’s not going to promote 1,000,000.

“I take into consideration my long-term imaginative and prescient for what we’re doing as being form of like Leica, the digicam firm. They do loopy issues that simply wouldn’t exist in any other case, like their monochrome camera. I believe it’s a really technically attention-grabbing factor. There’s clearly a tiny viewers for it. And so with a view to make it in any cheap approach, you must cost a ton for it, as a result of how many individuals on Earth are going to purchase it? However I’m happier that that exists on this planet.”

As wild as it could be to reinvent the stabilizer and the change simply to make a number of hundred seven-pound keyboards for wealthy coders, Norbauer plans to make different keyboards, now that he has the “full stack” of switches, stabilizers, and firmware and isn’t constrained by the handful of layouts obtainable in Topre keyboards.

“The Seneca is supposed to be this very dense sound-absorbing keyboard, a extra deep thocky form of factor that’s a everlasting set up in your desk. And so the subsequent factor is to go as far to the opposite finish of the spectrum on these issues as doable.”

It can most likely be a 60-key HHKB-layout keyboard. It might need Bluetooth. And he’s considering of doing it in both milled polycarbonate or cast carbon fiber, if he can pull that off. “The sound signature will likely be radically totally different. The burden will likely be radically totally different. And we’ll optimize for the other of every little thing we optimize for on the Seneca.”

There are such a lot of extra attention-grabbing issues for Norbauer to deal with. He’s having the firmware rewritten to make it open-source and add {hardware} remapping. There’s the subsequent keyboard to design. New supplies to experiment with. And there’s that different stabilizer design, the easier one — a number of firms have approached him about getting it into manufacturing, however it wants a bit extra R&D first.

Simply don’t ask for a timeline. It’ll be achieved when it’s achieved.