Keyboard Builders' Digest / Tips & Tricks
Doys & BLOCK caps
Two uniform keycap profiles with a retro square base: Doys by Deadline.Studio and BLOCKs by HIBI.
Published March 17, 2023
I started to stumble upon Japanese tweets with Doys keycaps about a week ago. No wonder, after hitting European shelves a few days earlier (keygem), yushakobo.com stocked up on these caps as well.
The Doys by Deadline.Studio are uniform keycaps with spherical tops and a square base, similar to those distinctive caps you can see on some vintage Siemens/Tandberg keyboard models, at ESA, and on two of my recently purchased Reuters trading keyboards:
Don't ask me why I'm collecting these, but there's something soothing about seeing another board in the family photo of my Reuters trading terminals.#KEEB_PD #vintage #Reuters #keyboard pic.twitter.com/jar5U2PQHb
— kbd.news (@KbdNews) February 26, 2023
HIBI has a similar one, with less options, which is probably harder to come by: the BLOCKS.
What I can tell you after disassembling the Reuters mentioned above, the square base makes removing the caps a real challenge. Some keycap pullers may not work at all, but you have to be very careful in general even if you have the proper tools. E.g. I received the Reuters with two stems already broken off, however, those vintage stems looked much weaker compared to MX ones.
Other than that, it's always good to see a new-old profile on the market. While probably not the best idea for typing and to populate a whole keyboard, you can design stylish macropads and interfaces with them.
But if I haven't scared you off, feel free to build something more serious, like this ortho cyberdeck dubbed blockparty:
Published on Fri 17th Mar 2023. Featured in KBD #116.
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