I Upgraded a $40 Amazon Keyboard Into a BAKENEKO

yep that is glue all right yes you're gonna be the secret weapon that helps me win my precious this mine yep that's glue elmer's white glue to be exact and why am i putting white glue into a bunch of keycaps well i have nothing else better to do safe and non-toxic actually it's because of this i'm so sick and tired of being a sore loser and like losing all of these challenges so in this one i challenge all of you guys to mod a similar keyboard however there's a twist you're all gonna get randomized budgets and hopefully i get the highest one so you're all going down wait wait wait randomized budgets that's right could be 20 could be more twenty dollars yep that's all you get and all tools are included because guess what you don't just have lube lying around in your room now do you don't say yes you don't so betty from switch and click gathered bunch of us and challenged us to a keyboard modding contest and being the master kissed i am i decided to accept and what's the point of accepting a challenge unless you're in it to win it right and plan to win is what i did and guess what i did win actually at least one portion of it thanks to you guys so there was a poll that was put out for the best sounding keyboard as well as the best looking keyboard well i definitely did not win the best looking portion however i did win the sound portion science speaking of science i have an interesting section in here so please watch out for that and also provide a link to everyone's keyboard builds that participated in this little challenge so check it out in the description below so what was the details of this challenge you asked let's get into it so first we all decided to use the same keyboard to keep things fair this is a forty dollar budget keyboard that comes pre-built with everything included switches key caps and everything this is the woomier wk61 and it's not that great stock then we spun for a modding budget that ranged anywhere from twenty dollars to sixty dollars [Music] oh big baller and your boy got the fifty dollar budget sorry hippie oh so how are we gonna mod this thing i realized that fifty dollars it's not enough to go fancy so like no gmk caps or anything like that however it's enough to do little things and little things they add up so first up the utmo reds on this it's not great so i bought some j-wicks for 15 bucks then i need a lube for everything from switches to stabs 7.96 some sticky foam for the plate three dollars and 94 cents some masking tape for the pcb i couldn't afford the nice blue stuff so regular it is at 2.29 some polyfill for the case 2.99 and some elmer's glue because i don't have enough money to buy nice keycaps one dollar and not 39 cents and the secret weapon this thing the gummy o-ring from a vodka nickel five dollars so out of the 50 budget i had i actually spent 38.57 now how does all these things come together to make this [Music] that sounds like this well let's get started we shall start in three two one go shopping all right this is a keyboard that we all started off with the walmir wk61 it's a 60 budget keyboard with a decent platform to build off of i guess but it's pretty budget like 40 budget it's a hot swap i think that's pretty much it oh wait actually it has a daughter board too so that's pretty actually important other than that this is a pretty basic keyboard it comes with an abs caps a steel plate a thin tray mount plastic case and these utamu reds honestly i tried the box version of the utamo reds on the euseo before and it wasn't too bad but this one i'm not sure what it is but it just sounded so thin and cheap i replaced them with lube jwix really nice and smooth for the price just 23 cents each then i needed to do something about the plate it's a heavier steel plate but this thing still pinged like crazy but i didn't really have the budget to get some custom plate foam cut out so i did this remember the stick on foam it's actually vinyl weather seal that used for doors and windows but if you cut it it actually works perfect for dampening metal plates so i did that then i taped up the pcb three layers in this case for that additional thaki sound now the part you've been waiting for the gummy o-ring this is the gummy o-ring from a bucket necklace 60. gummy o-ring mounts are interesting that it provides a nice and soft typing experience and also has a very clean sound profile how does this work well time for a quick technical segment but before we do that a quick word from our sponsor keeps for all keeps for all is a los angeles space vendor that sells everything keyboard related but one thing about them makes them truly unique keeps for all also has a marketplace that allows sellers to send in products they want to sell and buyers to buy this is a great and trusted platform that allows both sellers and buyers to transact safely and also quickly so if you want to sell let's say a highly coveted keyboard instead of taking the risk on mech market you send the keyboard into keeps for all then they will inspect confirm and list the product up for sale at the price that you want to sell it for buyers can also buy with confidence because keeps for all is inspecting every board and ensuring that it's at the condition that seller is actually listing it for if you're not satisfied you can always return it within 48 hours as long as the keep is in its original condition you can literally sell and buy everything with confidence from keeps to switches to even keycaps i could definitely go super broke from this marketplace so check it out in the description below so remember what i said about the airborne instructor born sounds airborne sound is when you type the sound is generated goes through the air and right into your ear structure-borne sound is when the force generated from your typing goes into the plate the pcb the case causes it all to resonate and comes out as sound and into your ear now in a typical case where there are hard mounting points there's a lot of opportunities for structure-borne sound however in a keyboard like back and echo the plate and pcb assembly is so well insulated the only contact between the pcb and plate assembly and the case is through a soft gummy ring so in the case of a gummy o-ring mount like the bakaneko you hear a lot more of the plate and the pcb the switches and keycaps and a lot less of the case and the case resonance typically this yields a cleaner and clackier sound because you aren't hearing much of the case and what you get into the case is actually mostly airborne now let's get deeper into this so we can apply it to keyboards from a structure-borne sound and noise perspective there are two major factors that impact its frequency first one is mass or the weight of the object and the second one is stiffness of the object by convention as the mass of the material increases the frequency of the sound it generates decreases it's actually inversely proportional on the other hand as the stiffness of the material increases the frequency of the sound it generates increases as well it's actually directly proportional one easy and common application of this concept is a guitar a standard guitar has six strings of different thicknesses and weight so let's think about it this way if you take all six strings and tension it the same the thicker strings will sound deeper and as you get thinner and thinner it becomes higher pitched so if you hold the stiffness the same the heavier material will generate a deeper sound on the other hand if you take just one string so mass is now held constant and adjust the tension the tighter or stiffer the string becomes the frequency becomes higher so if you loosen it and lower the stiffness of the string the sound becomes lower so deepest sounds come from soft heavy things and high pitched sounds come from stiff lightings easy right now we know this so let's start to apply it to the keyboard itself in the situation of a gummy mount keyboard like a packing echo or in this case the wk61 a keyboard knuckle let's just call it that for the lack of a better name you're hearing a lot more of the pcb and the plate so then the pcb and play material becomes very important shaping the sound given that we can't really change the pcb material let's focus on the plate the plate in question in this case is a 60 plate it's about 288 millimeters by 97 millimeters by 1.5 millimeters thick it has a volume of 41 904 cubic millimeters or 42 cubic centimeters why is this important because of this next section so when it comes to plates many of us asked which plate is stiff which one is soft then the question kind of changes to which one is thaki and which one is clacky so let's try to adjust this in the most scientific way possible shall we so the first thing we want to hit is the stiffness of the plate this is actually the easiest to determine there is already a set constant called the young's modulus that determines how easily the material could bend or stretch so higher young's modulus makes it harder to bend or stretch which also indicates that the material is actually stiffer this is actually measured in gigapascals given this i created this chart to show some of the most common play materials and their young's modulus stiffness as you can see it's pretty much follows a street convention we know steel is very stiff carbon fiber also and something like palm or pc is very soft it's all numerical and objective makes a lot of sense right also this is something we can use to determine what material is foggy or clacky because if you remember stiffer materials is higher in frequency than softer ones this is all great and all but it only tells one part of the story when it comes to sound remember sound is determined by both stiffness and the mass so what happens if you look just at the mass remember the volume measurement we did of that plate 42 cubic centimeters well if you have the volume and the density of the material you can actually easily find its mass the equation is mass equals density times volume given that density for a material is constant and easily searchable this is the mass i get and the mass is in grams so when you sort it by mass and correlated to sound frequency things get really weird if heavier equals more thought then brass and steel is the most stock that's not really true well it's because of the fact that you have to consider both stiffness and mass together going back to the guitar string example you can take the thickest e string and tighten it a lot and take a thinner a string and loosen it up a little bit even though the e string should be deeper in this situation it'll actually sound higher pitch than the thinner a string the same concept is actually being applied right now to the plate sound as well so given that how do we correlate stiffness and mass it's actually more math actually now there's this metric called a specific stiffness it's a measurement of the stiffness versus the weight ratio this is actually something very important in the aerospace industry because if you're building an airplane you want materials that are very stiff and also very light so if the specific stiffness is high it means that it's a very stiff material with a very low weight it's calculated by taking the young's modulus and then dividing it by its density this is relatable in this case because stiffened light equals clack and soft and heavy equals thought right so a low specific stiffness equals stock and a high specific stiffness equals clack specific stiffness in this case is denoted by giga pascals over grams over cubic centimeters i don't think that really matters too much at this point so let's take a look overall for the most part this aligns with our street convention something like carbon fiber has a very very high specific stiffness we also know that carbon fiber plates are very clacky on the other hand something like polycarbonate has a very low specific stiffness we also know that pc is generally stocky for me everything was good except one thing brass i think most of us in this hobby felt that brass is stiff and it should be a clacky plate material however because of its heavy weight according to the calculations it's actually one of the deeper sounding materials i was really doubtful so i also had a chance to review the natural frequency of brass versus aluminum versus steel and it actually showed that brass had the lowest natural resonant frequency out of the three so i tried it out so i guess i can't really fight against science the brass is definitely much deeper than the aluminum plate so now i won't doubt i know that this is probably a bit too much for most people but now rather than saying hey scott says pc is soft and mike says carbon fiber is clack we can look at this chart and say yup pc is softer and dockier than pom because it has a specific stiffness value of 2 versus 2.6 i know that this is not the be all and all data because you have to also factor in like interactions and such and there's a lot of things that also impact sound but i think it's a good start a good start to be objective so with that all said we know that the keyboard neko will have a clackier sound profile due to its steel plate sorry we took such a long detour to explain this gummy mouth and the plate impact the sound so let's just keep going shall we so after i put the o-ring on i have to cut off the standoffs this way the o-ring will be able to function properly and give you that nice little bounce that you're looking for one thing i also found was that the space bar stabilizer is actually facing down for this one so the o-ring actually rubbed against it and made the space bar stick so i had to actually tuck the o-ring underneath the pcb but overall it was still okay and fit right in and worked out okay and finally i stuck in some polyfill in this case the keyboard sounded hollow due to its cavernous nature and we're getting a lot of airborne sound into the case so the polyfill was actually a perfect tool to alleviate this so now we have the major components modified let's go into the most tedious and ridiculous mod that i have ever done this is called a glue double shot yes i filled each key cap to increase the thickness of the cap the caps were so cheap and i didn't have a budget for better caps and it was a huge pain in the a one cap at a time then i waited for it to dry and then i did another layer because i didn't realize that once the glue dries it like turns super thin because it's mostly water so i had to layer it should you do this no i had to do it because i didn't have the budget for nicer cap so did it work i don't know maybe i think so i would like to say so after all that time but all in all this is the final product looks wise it's the same as stock let's just say it's a it's a sleeper keyboard you know or you could just call it for what it is it's ugly it definitely won't win any beauty contest and it really didn't i think the winner for the best looking went to lewis however from a sound perspective it's pretty good and from a field perspective it's also pretty good too so check it out and that's the sound you voted for i believe this was actually the keyboard d from a sound test and that was actually the winner so thank you so much for voting for it sounds the best is keyboard d oh wow which wow i'm pretty sure that is scott's reward so at the end of the day this keyboard was a total of about 79 so for under 80 bucks you're able to emulate something close to a back and echo like the whole thing built out with keycaps and switches and everything that is pretty cool overall this was a very fun collaboration and i hope that it was fun for you to watch as well i want to thank switch and click hipio andy and lewis for inviting me to this collab i hope i could do more of these collabs in the future if i ever get invited again i appreciate the votes for the best sound i really do and i hope that this can help some of you out there try something fun and creative with the wk61 or even your own boards as well so thank you

Channel: Keybored

Views: 304,226

Keywords: Mechanical Keyboard, ASMR, Taeha, taeha types, badseed tech, glarses, hamaji neo, squashy boy, :3ildcat, Custom Keyboard, keybored, custom mechanical, Keyboard Kits, best budget mechanical keyboard, gateron ink black, ink black, box ink black, box ink pink, smooth linear, thoccy linear, thoc, Gateron, Qwertykeys, Qwertykeys QK65, Best Entry Custom Mechanical, womier, womier wk61, Andy V Nguyen, switch & Click, Hipyo Tech, Lewis Toh, #keyboardchallenge, Keyboard Collaboration, JWICK

Id: zt-WsH7Z9c8

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2022