The way to construct one of the best keyboard on this planet

The time period “endgame,” amongst keyboard fans, is type of a operating gag. Endgame is if you lastly dial in your good format, 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 should compromise someplace — normally time or cash. Typically the factor you’re in search of simply doesn’t exist.

However what if you happen to didn’t should compromise? What if you happen to had the time, the persistence, the inventive 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 strong 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 very flat typing angle.

It weighs seven kilos and prices $3,600.

You may 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 final couple of months typing on an early Seneca, and the reply to the final query is the simplest. Sure. It’s unbelievable. It’s definitely 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 sort 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 group 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 private 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 that a extra linked world can be a greater one.

The Seneca represents Norbauer’s try to make the very best laptop keyboard, to his personal requirements and tastes, with out worrying about price — the sort of keyboard that appears and appears 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 massive, chunky, and has a regular tenkeyless format, relatively 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 easy methods to construct them from scratch. About 20 years in the past, he bought 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 wished to begin and I couldn’t rent anybody to code it for me. So I’m like, ‘Okay, I assume I simply should learn to code.’”

He spent six months coding for 14 hours a day; this bought him a web site, a startup, and tendonitis. Fixing the tendonitis concerned adopting correct typing type (wrists straight, palms hovering over the keyboard like a pianist’s). Looking for a extra comfy keyboard ultimately 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 unique 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 bought 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 realized sufficient machining to make a prototype on a WWII-era milling machine. As soon as he was glad with the design, he discovered a producer and launched a small group purchase on a keyboard discussion board and requested if every other Topre diehards wished 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 folks simply stored asking me to make increasingly, and the factor sort of snowballed by itself.” He did a number of extra rounds of the case ultimately dubbed the Norbatouch, in a number of new colours, together with a beige to go along with his now formally licensed Star Trek keycaps. Then, as a result of folks stored 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 Blissful Hacking Keyboard.

Every was an opportunity to refine his aesthetic and his manufacturing functionality, and to experiment with completely 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 should 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 wished extra management over the opposite elements of the board, and he wished one thing to supply individuals who just like the Norbauer aesthetic however aren’t up for getting a keyboard, cracking it open, voiding the guarantee, and transplanting the center into a brand new case.

Once I first emailed Norbauer in late 2018, he was already speaking about constructing a ready-to-type keyboard — one thing folks might decide up and luxuriate in immediately. “I didn’t know precisely what that may appear to be, and I definitely didn’t know the way laborious it might be to get to that time. If I did, I in all probability by no means would have undertaken it.”

He made a prototype utilizing off-the-shelf elements — customary 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 wished all alongside: a keyboard with a heavy metallic chassis and his personal retrofuturistic aesthetic, with the snappy tactile suggestions of a Topre-like capacitive dome swap and compatibility with the broad world of aftermarket keycaps.

He employed {an electrical} engineering agency to design the PCB, which he figured can be the toughest half, since Topre swap clones are fairly simple to come back by. That took a couple of yr, on and off. “After which I spotted, ‘Shit, I assume I’ve to make all the opposite stuff that goes with it.’ And that took about 5 years.”

Someplace alongside the road, the challenge was a deliberate train in making one of the best keyboard he presumably can, no matter price. “It was a kind of issues the place my ambitions simply sort of spiraled uncontrolled.”

For instance: Topre switches really feel nice to sort on, however they are usually wobbly on the prime — comprehensible for one thing sitting on prime of a rubber dome — and keycaps typically find yourself barely crooked. He wished a barely deeper typing sound, and he wished 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 like 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 easy 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 downside. Stabilizers are the mechanisms that hook up with lengthy keys, just like the area bar, shift, enter, and backspace, and ensure the entire key strikes downward on the identical fee no matter the place it’s pressed. They work, however they sound horrible, until you discover some technique to cease the wire from rattling within the housing, the slider from slamming into the PCB, and the varied plastic elements from rubbing collectively. Often this entails some mixture of lubes, greases, and bodily damping. Tuning the stabilizers is probably the most time-consuming and tough 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 regular factor, proper? However I believed it simply can be attention-grabbing to see if there was some technique to remedy this downside with out requiring all of it to be primarily based 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 of a “90 % resolution” — higher than something available on the market, with out lube. However 90 % there’s 10 % not there. He began over.

He labored with a agency that makes a speciality of kinematics to develop a very new stabilizer mechanism. Truly, they got here up with two new stabilizer mechanisms. The primary is a compliant-beam design that’s considerably higher than current stabilizers in addition to his first prototype. It’s a lot much less vulnerable to rattle or tick. It’s as near good as you will get with out completely rethinking how stabilizers work. The second design is an advanced collection of pin-joint hinges with 5 instances as many elements as a regular stabilizer. It’s hideously costly to supply 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 normal strategy, which is that fixing technical issues is rather more attention-grabbing than making an attempt to reduce manufacturing prices. On the Seneca, that’s taken to a deliberate excessive. “Our aim is simply to make this good, and that’s all that issues. And so at any time when there was a department, I used to be like, ‘Let’s go along with the rightest technique to do it and rattling the prices.’ And that has been the philosophy of this board.”

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

The switchplate is milled from strong 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 incorporates 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 aspect. Lemo connectors are safer than USB and Norbauer thinks they’re cool, and funky is best, 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 prime surfaces and centered legends have precisely the aesthetic Norbauer was in search of, and it’s extra comfy to sort 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 will be managed with injection molding alone.

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

“Typically, if it’s not reamed fairly sufficient, you’ll get a bit of little bit of sluggishness within the match between these elements. And the friction throughout the entire system is cumulative. So when you’ve got a bit of 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 a bit of bit sluggish,” says Norbauer. When that occurs, they should disassemble the keyboard, repair the stabilizer, and begin over.

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

The response is a right away “Not but! Oh God.”

“I imply, undoubtedly after I promote this primary batch, and doubtless the second batch, and nicely into the third or fourth, I might 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 significantly worthwhile. “My aim has at all times been principally to interrupt even whereas additionally doing actually cool R&D stuff. I’m not personally dropping a ton of cash. However the Heavy Grail, for instance, was a highly regarded providing. Folks actually liked it and it offered far more than I ever thought it might. And that helped bootstrap and fund the Seneca, however 100% of what would have been revenue went into that.”

At the same time as he was transitioning Norbauer & Co. from an organization that sells housings to at least one that sells keyboards, he stored operating into the truth that he doesn’t like most elements of operating a enterprise. This isn’t an enormous downside if you’re promoting a number of dozen DIY housings at a time to Topre fans as a self-funding passion. When you’re making an attempt to construct a enterprise that sells totally customized luxurious keyboards, it’d grow to be an issue.

Final yr, when the Seneca was largely 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 outdated acquaintance. The association leaves Norbauer with a majority stake and complete inventive management — he’s nonetheless the CEO — and lets him give attention to creating keyboards whereas different folks maintain the “getting cash” a part of it.

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

The Seneca received’t make you a greater author — or a quicker one, to my chagrin (ask me what number of deadlines I blew penning this piece). I, personally, can not 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 tons of of hundreds of {dollars} creating it’s wild; that he really pulled it off is even wilder. The switches and stabilizers alone are an amazing achievement, and proper now the Seneca is the one place they dwell.

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

Not that he desires to promote a lot of keyboards. In truth, not promoting lots of keyboards is a part of the plan. He offered 50 of them final summer season, sight unseen, in a personal preorder for a gaggle of earlier purchasers — paying beta testers, primarily. Proper now he’s promoting one other 150 or so “First Version” keyboards, to be delivered in late summer season. Then he’ll in all probability 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 sort of like Leica, the digicam firm. They do loopy issues that simply wouldn’t exist in any other case, like their monochrome digicam. I believe it’s a really technically attention-grabbing factor. There’s clearly a tiny viewers for it. And so in an effort to make it in any cheap manner, 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 might be to reinvent the stabilizer and the swap 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 accessible in Topre keyboards.

“The Seneca is supposed to be this very dense sound-absorbing keyboard, a extra deep thocky sort 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 attainable.”

It should in all probability be a 60-key HHKB-layout keyboard. It may need Bluetooth. And he’s pondering of doing it in both milled polycarbonate or solid carbon fiber, if he can pull that off. “The sound signature will probably be radically completely different. The burden will probably be radically completely different. And we’ll optimize for the alternative 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.