I'm sure most of you know the color amber, it being an old-school LED color for forever. This is not about those LEDs.
This is the Amber Room. It's a room in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo near St. Petersburg. I saw it in a National Geographic as a kid and fell in love with it.
What has this to do with a keyboard?
I have a Focus Electronics 2001 mechanical keyboard with white Alps switches. I love it. But it got gunky, and I had to disassemble it. When I did, I noticed that it looked almost just like the keyboards that Datamancer uses for his $1500 steampunk keyboards, as well as the Warehouse 13 keyboard.
As proof, see here.
Yes, that's brass sheeting. I may or may not use it.
So, I have roughly forty pounds of amber (or copal, either way they look almost identical) and a LOT of experience at cutting it. Works very much like acrylic, actually. And, since I need progress...
This will be slow going. It takes the better part of an hour to cut a key from rough. And yes, I will clean the steel plate the switches are mounted on. But a perusal of the pictures shows they went with the design of the stone, just as I'm forced to do here. Every key will be unique. Still considering putting gold ink in the etchings on the keys. Thoughts?
I'll be back with more and where the waste goes. Nothing is wasted, really.