Keyboard Builders' Digest /
The Long Journey Of The Event Horizon
Designer Tim Van Damme writes about the design and manufacturing process of his unique Event Horizon keyboard.
Published December 19, 2023
Intro
This was my “I have no idea what I’m doing” keyboard. Over the course of almost exactly 2 years, I had to figure out how to turn a frankly bonkers idea into a real product. Spoiler: I didn’t do it alone. Here’s the process…
Legendary
–ClackBait
A piece of art
–multiple people
Board of the year
–alexotos
As a creative professional, there’s something that fascinates me about seeing someone learn to do something for the first time. They break all the rules simply because they don’t know the rules yet.
The results are both highly original but also highly unrealistic. After a while, as they learn more about the topic and its intricacies, what typically happens is the results get more tame, more in line with what others are doing.
2 years ago, my friend Ecto from Protozoa told me they wanted to produce a keyboard designed by me. I was overconfident so immediately said yes, but was definitely at the start of the curve described above…
The Design
I can’t remember the exact reason, but immediately I wanted to go for something with contrasting colors. The first render doesn’t look like the final product, but some of the core ideas were clearly present.
Things evolved quickly after that. The dark surface was extended to the sides, and I didn’t just want contrasting colors, but also contrasting textures.
The Event Horizon badge was added 8 hours later, and most of the structural bits of the board were there.
For the dark finish, at first my (in hindsight hilarious) idea was to bead blast it with the biggest beads known to mankind and create a hammered texture that way. Obviously this is completely impossible for a variety of reasons all of which I had to learn. In the end I was saved when I found out about this thing called wrinkle coating.
Wrinkle coating is the process where the board gets statically charged, and a thick layer of powder is sprayed onto it. The powder clings on because of the charge, and the board goes into the oven where something really interesting happens: The powder melts, and (this is the part where I’m making assumptions because I don’t actually know how it works) the materials shift, kinda like putting water and oil together. When it comes out of the oven, the result is the coating you see on the board today. It feels violent and random and tactile, and I’m completely smitten by it.
Moving From Digital Into Physical
After a couple more rounds of iterations, the design was pretty much set. We figured out how to get the iconic dual finish (multiple people called us crazy for wanting to re-machine a perfectly fine, freshly coated board), and settled on the materials we wanted to use for both Event Horizon and Supermassive.
Since I design everything in Blender (because I haven’t learned how to properly use CAD software), I rely on Ecto to take my design and turn them into something a machine could understand (I’m dramatically oversimplifying his work here; he basically took a toddler’s drawings and turned them into a detailed blueprint). With that wrapped up, it was time to start thinking about a first prototype.
The base shape isn’t that complex (from the side you might even mistake it for a Tofu), it’s the details that make this board (in my opinion).
The first prototype wasn’t only insanely sharp (I got a deep cut while cleaning it; we solved this by adding a small chamfer all around the top), it also didn’t feel 100% comfortable to type on. My thumbs sat on the bottom ridge in a way that just didn’t feel pleasant. To solve this (and to add an identifiable element to the top) I designed this ridge with small holes. After the top is machined off, the wrinkle coat inside the holes stays, creating this (IMO) beautiful pattern which also feels nice to rest your thumbs on. Fun fact: The pattern was inspired by a Krispy Kreme board I designed for Salvun waaaaay before he joined this project. Salvun if you’re reading this: I still want to run the Krispy Kreme board.
Production facilities in China are plentiful and most of them can do absolutely amazing things for extremely good prices. But prototype after prototype (3 in total), the boards we got back all felt like they were missing… something.
They were executed to spec, but they lacked soul. This wasn’t a board I could confidently ask people to purchase.
On top of that it took us months between prototypes because of the large cultural and language gap, and we had invested a significant amount of money already.
What we needed was someone closer to home (for faster feedback cycles) who could produce the board in an opinionated way, someone who could be part of the creative process through the sheer knowledge they’d bring to the project. That someone happens to live right in my (figurative) backyard, and is called Salvun.
The Craftsman
I had known Salvun for a while at this point. About 2 years ago, I brought him 2 boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts which marked the beginning of our friendship. We started working together on some small projects like artisans etc, but hadn’t done anything this size. Working with him would affect the price due to it being produced in Europe (and Salvun being a perfectionist), but in my opinion we either pushed on in this direction or called it quits and shelved the project.
Early September 2023, the week before I started a new job and thus had some time off, I drove to his shop every day. The plan was to knock out a prototype in 4 days, from start to finish.
The Final Prototype
I smile every time I think of that week. Day after day, we knocked out step after step (4 big steps in total) as if we all knew what we were doing (Salvun did, I absolutely did not).
Day one he took a spare slab of aluminum he had laying around, mounted it into one of his large CNC machines, and machined out the top. So far so good.
The second day things got trickier. He had to make a negative of the top in which we could mount the board upside down and have it vacuum sealed in place. Once again, this went as smooth as it could, and the bottom part was machined right before I had to head home for dinner with the family.
Day 3 we took the machined board and took it over to his best friend Becoating (who lives 15 minutes from his shop). We didn’t have the final wrinkle coating material on hand, so used leftover “Copper Slag” that was used on some Salvations. Again I was stunned by the craftsmanship that went into this process. The board got coated, and we put it in the oven.
Day 4 was the most stressful. Not just because it was the last day I was able to make the drive over, but because the most delicate part of the operation was going to happen: Machining the top of a freshly coated board.
The prototypes we had made in China all had various degrees of chipping along the edge of where the top was machined off. This makes sense since the thick coating isn’t made to be machined again.
It was so predictable I even made sure chipping was visible in all the renders I made, and made sure to mention it very clearly on the website.
Since we also didn’t yet have a proper way to re-mount the board into the CNC machine (something we did have for the review units and production run, but didn’t have time to assemble for the initial prototype), I was sure chipping would happen again.
But guess what? There wasn’t a chipped bit in sight. Even though we used a very dodgy way to clamp the board down (did you know vices are handy tools?), and Salvun used a tool that was on its final legs after machining a couple of dozen of boards, the separation of the top was absolutely perfectly crisp.
This was the point where I felt I could breathe again. This was a board I was proud of.
An Unexpected Outcome
I took the prototype and built it for the first time, when something struck me: This particular prototype was felt different from the ones we received from China. It was mostly similar, but multiple small details were just… more refined?
What had happened the week I spent at his workshop, is that he didn’t just produce the prototype. Every single step he asked why certain things were designed the way they were, and offered suggestions. Things to change, things to improve, things to add (he rightfully made me redo the entire bottom layout of the board).
Here’s the best way I’m able to describe it: The prototypes we received from China were like chairs you’d buy at IKEA. Perfectly fine, reasonably priced, and/but absolutely identical. Soulless, some would say. The prototype Salvun finished, and the review units after that, all have an artisanal feeling to them, like if you’d commission a master carpenter to create you a custom set of chairs. Subtle differences here and there because of the countless hours of manual work that goes into it, but a stunning end product with a level of detail and quality (and soul!) you can feel.
It’s hard to put into words, so I was very happy watching alexotos’ face when he first unboxed his review unit live on Twitch, and ClackBait’s after that. They felt it too. I’m convinced every single person who buys one of these will feel the same thing. It isn’t a China-produced Matrix board (which are in my opinion some of the best out there), it’s a board designed and produced in Belgium, where every single person involved left their mark.
So what’s next? Like I mentioned at the start of this piece, I knew absolutely nothing about designing keyboards when I got started on Event Horizon. Since then, I’ve been working with Protozoa and Salvun on some other projects (big commissions for tech companies etc), and learned a ton. I’m putting the finishing touches on my second board (called Gridlock), after which Protozoa will do their thing, and Salvun his. We’re at least a couple of months out, but I can already tell it won’t have the same story as Event Horizon.
| Tim Van Damme |
|---|---|
| Handle | maxvoltar |
| Location | Belgium |
| Description | My kids call me either “dad” or “nerd”. |
| Occupation | Software designer by day, keycap and keyboard designer by night. |
| Joined (the hobby) | Late 2019 |
| Fav. switch | Trash switches, overlubed |
| Fav. keycap profile | MTNU, Cherry |
| Other hobbies | F1, eating |
| Links | timvandamme.com, mvkb.com, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Discord Server |
Published on Tue 19th Dec 2023. Featured in KBD #2023.