I’ll have a more detailed post on the assembly of this thing once I have the final parts put together, but I’ve sourced myself the bits necessary for a ten-key-less mechanical keyboard (otherwise known as a TKL keyboard).

The keycaps showed up today:

And along with them, one hundred Cherry MX Blue switches:

I’ve been using mechanical keyboards for a while now, starting with a Model M I scrounged from the campus IT department I then used through college and grad school, then a Unicomp reproduction hard-wired to Dvorak (which was not a great idea), then most recently a Logitech Orion using their Romer-G custom switches, and a Corsair K70 mk.2 that uses MX Browns.

I have liked both the Romer-G and the MX Brown switches, but I’ve been wanted to go to something with a defined click again for a while. The K70 can be ordered with MX Blues, but there was a lot of appeal to finding myself a “standard” keyboard that can take various keycaps and be reconfigured at will.

The plate/board I’ll be using is the Drop CTRL, which I ordered without switches or keys so I could just use my own. I ended up not saving anything more than about $20 doing it this way, but in the end, I’ll have caps I wanted, the switches I wanted, and a keyboard that doesn’t require soldering work to swap out switches down the line if I want to test another brand or line.

The CTRL is the only part that hasn’t yet arrived. I’m hoping it’s here before the end of the week.