My current daily driver is a MiniVan Catalyst with aluminium case and GMK Paperwork. It was — until the self-isolation and home office due to COVID19 — my travel keyboard which I used to carry around in a MiniVan holster inside my daypack. Here’s a potato shot of it:
Until last night it was plateless and had Zealios v2 67g switches. It wasn’t too loud for home office (and especially was more quiet than my other MiniVans with plastic case), but a while ago I wanted to use it at the annual general meeting (AGM) of an association for writing the minutes — and it was too loud despite I thought it was quite silent for not being explicitly dampened at all.
My daily driver of the past few months (approximately from January when I came back from the 36C3 until a week ago or so) was another plateless MiniVan, this time with black stock plastic case, GMK SkIIdata and Durock T1 switches. Another potato shot:
I planned to make that aluminium MiniVan really silent since that AGM. Did that last night despite I don’t really need a silent keyboard for home-office:
- Replaced the Zealios with Zilents v2 65g. Had to rip them out of an incomplete 60% build with hotswap DZ60 — which I never used because the Control key caps (SA Carbon) scratched on the inner corners of the wooden case and I still don’t have the proper plate for that build. (Probably need to get a Dremel or so to get that 60% case fixed. Just using a file didn’t work out.)
- Added a dampening foam by MKUltra.click which until then was in that black MiniVan mentioned above. Had to rip out all switches except those of the spacebars to unmount the foam there. Rebuilt that MiniVan without the foam again.
- Added a yet unused MiniVan plate (from the MiniVan Catalyst GB; was too lazy to add it to any of my MiniVans until now) to extend the dampening effect of the foam.
I’m really happy with the outcome. My MiniVan Catalyst is mostly silent now. Just the spacebars are still as loud as before, probably because of not much dampening foam below them. Maybe I should also lube their stabs and/or try a gauze mod (or how are they called?). Not sure if the latter is possible at all for below-3u spacebars, though.
(And the deskmat shown in the two pictures is this Millennium Falcon “mousepad” from KPRepublic.)