Ultimate Guide to Custom Keycap Sets for Mechanical Keyboards | ABS vs PBT, GMK, Profiles, and more!

keycaps are a great way to customize your mechanical keyboard they come in all sorts of shapes sizes and color but that can make it very overwhelming for a newcomer to come in and figure out what they should buy today i'll be telling you what you need to know to get started on buying custom keycaps for your mechanical keyboard the focus of this video will be on limited and custom keycaps rather than in-stock keycaps that you can buy from vendors such as amazon however i'll link some resources below on install keycap sets to buy custom keycap sets you will have to join group buys group buys are basically a pre-order product before it goes into production you can think of it as like a kickstarter where you give someone money they go off and make the product and you wait many months for it to be shipped to you and yes you're going to wait many months to get your keycaps and group buys you could wait for the group buy to be over and buy the extra kits that are available however you'll be paying more money for them versus the group by price and you will be fighting over a limited amount of keycaps that are available in the extras you can find that by group buys on the subreddit met group buys or on geek hack one thing to keep a note about group buys are minimum order quantities or moqs this is essentially the minimum amount of kits that need to be sold in order for the keycap set to be made into production unless you have an uncommon layout you probably don't ever have to worry about moqs let's take a look at some group buys and i'll walk you through the kits that are available let's take a look at gmk brad this is a group buy that's currently happening in july so it looks like in this group buys there are three different kits of keycaps that you can buy you have the base set extension and novelties the base set for gmk sets you're always going to be buying the base set it's everything that you need to cover a keyboard for the most part so you have your alphas your modifiers function row numpad and even some smaller modifiers such as this smaller right shift this is a 1.75 shift and i'll talk more about sizes in a little bit you also have a 7u space bar and things like that not every gmk set will have the same base set for example a gmk set may not include the numpad because they're trying to target a lower price point this extension kit is basically for very uncommon keyboard layouts and if you know that you need this kit you're probably not watching this video right now but it includes some even smaller spaceboard if your keyboard supports a split spacebar or you have a specific layout that uses two smaller spacebar instead of once bigger space bar and you have other keys here for a 40 layout novelties are essentially icons for a gmk set so instead of having an enter key that just says enter you could have enter turkey that has a bread or says get that bread so these are usually designed by the keycap set designers the reason why you have multiple keys such as page up page down and delete is because gmk sets are a cherry profile and the chair profile are sculpted and i'll cover profiles later on in the video but that's just something to keep in mind uh let's take a look at another gmk set this is gmk classic red which is going on right now and the way that they made their kits they have one base kit so everyone will buy this if they want to get in on the set um they have a red alpha's kit so if you want to match your alphas with the modifiers you can buy both kits and have a completely red board and they have a spacebar kit that is similar to the extension kit of gmk brad however it only covers the space bar and not these extra keys up here and the way that gmk a minimum ore quantities work is that it's by kits so there needs to be a certain amount of kits sold of the base kit the right office kit in this base bar kit for it to be made let's take a look at if any keys um this one is a finicky port it's also a cherry profile set but made of a different plastic and i'll cover the two different plastics later on the video and looks like in this group by there are two kits there's the core kit which is very similar to the gmk base kit it's the kit that everyone buys to get in under the group buy it has all the keys that you could need on the keyboard for the most part alphas modifiers numpad navigation f row and so on and there's even some extra novelties here and different color space bar the mega add-on kit is something that you will need to buy if you have a more uncommon layout so if you need all these other smaller space bars this is a kit to get if you want to have apple key so command has it here and it has some other smaller like return keys backspace key for i believe 40 keyboards and similar to gmk i believe infinity's moq system is also based on kids so there needs to be a minimum of core kit sold and mega add-on kit sold for it to go into production next let's take a look at an sa group buy and this is going to go live in august and the kits here are broken out differently from gmk so you have the alphas as a standalone kit here and tkl specialty so this is essentially all the modifiers that you need and the reason why is called specialty is because it has a smaller modifier such as a smaller shift so this is a standard right shift here or sorry this is a standard right shift they also have two other smaller right shifts like for example this 1.75 is very common on 65 layout and some other kits they have are the numpad kit so you need a numpad kit you get this iso if you need an iso layout um or throw slash 40 so if you're using one of these more uncommon layouts and space keys is essentially the spacebar kit so you can see that in s8 kits they broke out the alphas and the modifiers and numpads but for gmk's and infiniki they just have it all in the base kit so this is something to keep in mind when you're buying custom keycaps figure out what are the keycaps are included in the kit and figure out which kit you need to cover the keyboard that you want next i want to show you a cat group eye this is cat milkshake that happened sometimes last year and cat is special because the way that they do their moq's is not per kit it's actually per key so i believe cat milkshake had a minimum or quantity of like 54 000 keys or something like that and since it's broken up by per key they're able to make a bunch more kids so for example there's a kit for just alphas here and they have uh this baguette key for some more specialized alphas they have blank mods along with just regular mods you also have command keys if you want those there for apple layouts so you can see that with a cat group by versus a gmk or infinity or sa is that you can be much more flexible with the kits that are offered so that when people are joining a group buy they don't have to buy the keys that they don't need and you can offer a lot more um fun keys so for example there's fruits so instead of having like just a regular f1 f2 you can fill that row up with fruits um you can even fill it with dots if you want so here's a bunch of dots and you can have all sorts of specialized alphas so for example this keycap designer designed his own font and created a kit out of it one thing that i really appreciate from infinity keys group buys and cat group buys that i haven't really noticed with gmks there's no sizing on the keys when you look at the images so for example um i can just tell by how big is these shifts are just because i've been looking at keycaps for years now but if you're a newcomer you you have no idea how big this shift is versus this shift versus this shift and like what exactly do you need and if this kit has it when you look at this cat um group by here so i only pull up the modifiers they have the size listed so the shift key here is there's a 2.75 shift there's a 1.75 shift in this modifier kit i think it's just those two yeah so while it still takes some learning to figure out what size key that you need for your layout it's really handy to see the actual size listed in the kits themselves versus having to go to a gmk render and like zoom in and kind of guesstimate with your eyes keycap sizes are measuring units or u one u refers to the smallest key cap on a keyboard for example the alphas and the numbers here are one u in size looking at a bigger keycap such as the backspace here a backspace is 2u because it's two times the size of the output keys so 1u and 2u's is exactly two times larger and tab is 1.5 views because it's 1.5 times bigger than the 1u keys on the keyboard if you're watching this video you're probably new to keycaps and keyboards in general so i'm not going to go too deep into all the different sizes that are available but something to keep in mind is when you're starting to dive deeper into other uncommon layouts such as 40 you're gonna have to find specific kits to fill your keyboard but generally if you're just starting out and you have a standard 65 keyboard a 60 keyboard a 75 keyboard buying the base kit will pretty much get you all the way there um for the most part this is why i really like it when keycap group buys lists out the sizes and modifiers it just makes it really easy to see that you are covered when you buy this specific kit i want to talk about 60 keyboards real quick because it's the most popular layout for custom keyboards let's just take a look at the bottom rows here the bottom rows of a six percent keyboard has a 6.25 space bar and a 1.25 modifiers here another really popular option is a seven u space bar this is the middle row here a seven u space bar with a 1.5 control all control all on the right two and a one u1 key on the left and right and really the differences is just up to preference some people like the look of this row and some people like the look of this row keycaps are usually made from two different types of plastics abs and pbt one isn't necessarily bearing the other they each have their pros and cons let's start by talking about abs abs tends to have crisper legends due to how they are produced and i'll talk about this later on in the video they're also more consistent because it's actually easier to mold the plastic however the biggest downside of abs is that they shine very quickly with use here is one example and i'm not sure if you can tell by the lighting but it's a pretty shiny key it's much more noticeable on darker keycap sets here's an example of abs shine on a lighter keycap set just like move that around it's not as noticeable because it's not dark ppt will take a much longer time to shine and they tend to have a rougher texture however pbt is a lot harder to molds so sometimes you may get some warped keys this is very common with the space bars because they're so long but you can fix this by just soaking in hot water and pressing down the sides on a flat surface it may seem like pbt is better than abs due to the lack of shine however abs is actually the more common plastics use and custom keycaps due to gmk gmk only uses abs plastic and they are probably the most popular manufacturer for high-end custom keycap sets however pbt is on the rise due to new profiles such as mt3 and cat in the end you may not have a choice in the type of plastics that's used depending on your keycap profile preference and the color way because like i mentioned before gmk only uses abs plastic however if any key who also makes cherry profiles like gmk they use ppt plastic and other profiles such as cat and mt3 and dsa are i believe only made from pbt plastic speaking of which let's go over all of these keycap profiles i just said keycap profiles fall under two categories uniform and sculpted with a uniform keycap profile all of the keys are the same shape so for example on this keyboard here you can see that in all of the rows the keycap shape remains consistent that means that i can take a keycap from this a row here and place it anywhere on the board and it will be correct in terms of the shape of the keycap it won't be correct in terms of legend however filling out a board with a uniform profile tends to be cheaper than buying a sculpted profile set free keyboard because you don't need as many keys so for example let's take a look at these two group buys for milkshake it ran as a dsa profile which is a new form profile and a cat profile which is sculpted you can see in this fruit kit here that with a uniform profile you only need to have one strawberry one cherry one apple and so on because you can put that one key anywhere on the keyboard and it will be correct however with the sculpted profile of the cat you need multiple of the same fruits because each key is sculpted differently depending on the road that it's on i'll quickly cover three uniform profiles today the first one is dsa dsa has a spherical top and a medium height next there's xda xc is very similar to dsa but has a larger surface area and the caps are a little bit taller than dsa there's cam so cam is a uniform profile that takes one row of a sculpted profile cat and uses that same keycap shape for all the rows on the keyboard lastly i'll talk about essay row three essay is actually a sculpted profile however some keycap sets take the third row of the keycap profile and use that same keycap shape for all the rows on the keyboards choosing between d3 profiles will depend on three things one the height of the actual keycap to the surface area of the keycap and three just the overall design of like the colors and the fonts and things like that next let's talk about sculpted profiles so sculptor profiles are designed to reduce the travel distance between your fingers on different rows so your fingers go on the home row here and when you want to reach up to like the num row or the afro by the keys being sculpted it makes it a little bit easier to reach those rows however as mentioned before since each row and a sculpted profile may differ that makes it so you need to have multiple of the same key legend to support other keyboard layouts so for example when we look at a gmk base set it may have two page up keys and two page down keys just just because some keyboards may have a page up key in a different role than another i'm gonna talk about five sculpted profiles um the most popular sculpted profile you'll probably run into with custom keycap sets is cherry and cherry profile is used by gmk ebbt um jtk and infinity key so when you buy a keycap set made from these manufacturers it would be a cherry profile next i'll talk oem you probably won't run into oem too often with custom sets it's mostly used on lower and keycap sets such as ones by tai hao but it's also a profile used for pre-built keyboards such as the annie pro and this keycap profile is a little bit higher than cherry next let's talk about essay it's a high profile keycap with a spherical shape and then there's cat cat is a cylindrical um profile and it's a little bit shorter than sa and it's also less sculpted but it's still higher than cherry and oem lastly there's mt3 and this is an exclusive profile by mass drop and with mt3 with his unique spherical designs it really holds the tip of your fingers as you type on it choosing between these sculpted keycap profiles will depend on how high you like a keycap to be how sculpted you like a profile to be and overall what is the design of the keycap set that's using this profile let's talk about how keycaps are made when it comes to custom keycaps there are two main processes double shot and dye subbed double shot is when you combine two different plastics together one for the legend and one for the base so in this keycap here you can see that there is a blue legend on the white base and if i turn it around you can see the the blue plastic that is used to create the legend double shot requires a mold for each key so when you look at gmk sets you use this double shot aps plastic all of the fonts are the same because it's very expensive to create a new mold every time you want to have a new font with dye sub which is mostly used with pvt plastic an image is printed on the film the film is then laid on the key cap and then it sublimates into the plastic this is similar to how custom t-shirts are made and the nice thing about dye subs is that you don't need a mold for each unique key because it's just ink going to the plastic so you can have a lot more unique keys for cheaper such as this milk bottle and this font that was custom made by the keycap designer if it will get into focus there we go the downside with dye sub is that you need to have a darker legend on the base so you can see that on my whole keyboard the legend is always darker than the base keycap that is on this makes it very limiting to have different color ways on pbt there is a reverse dice up process where you can have a lighter legend on a darker base however that hasn't really been prominent before due to the difficult process of getting nice legends however if any key a relatively new player and the custom keycap space it seems that they have developed a much easier way to have reverse dye sub and ppt which makes it possible to do sets like this um here so you can see on the alphas the legends are darker than the base so this is just a dice process and then for the modifiers with the white legends and the darker base this is using the daiso process if if any key can improve themselves to have a very reliable dye sub and reverse dice up process for their pvt keycaps i predict that pbt keycaps will become very popular in the future due to the benefits of it not shying easily and having a rougher texture so it's a little bit nicer to type on for some people next i want to do a quick typing test for you with all the keycap sets that i have um sound is a very important factor for me when building a mechanical keyboard lastly i want to go over the spreadsheet of past current and future group buys with you just so you have a better idea of what you're reading when you're looking at group buys so when you see let's see like gmk bento gmk nuclear data gmk later gmk is the manufacturer and they make cherry profile keycaps with double shot abs plastic sa is the keycap profile and is generally made by signature plastics which is based in washington state and they use a double shot abs plastic as well let's see so ebt ivory ebt is a manufacturer of cherry profiles um but they use a pbt plastic and is disupped let's see there's cat explosion and cat arctic cat is the keycap profile and it is made from pbt plastic that is dye subbed you see there's jtk zen jtk makes chair profiles out of abs plastics that double shot or even triple shot sometimes um infini key strawberry lemonade infinity key makes chair profiles out of pbt plastic and dye sub or reverse die subbed and let's see what else is here oh there's also r2 here so gmk laser r2 r2 means round two so this is the second time that this keycap set will have run some other stuff that you may run into is dsa dsa is the profile it's a uniform profile um without pbt plastic and dye subbed and there's also mt3 mt3 a pro a sculpted profile made out of pbt plastic and dye subbed and i think that will cover pretty much everything that you will run into at least for the end of this year anyways so what is the best keycap set out there well like most things in this hobby it really comes down to personal preference going to figure out do you like abs or pbt do you like a uniform profile or a sculpted profile my preference are sculpted profiles and pbt plastic my favorite sculpted profile is cherry but there hasn't really been much cherry ppt profiles that are out there just due to the limitations of the past however with if any key in the scene i'm looking forward to future um reverse dye subs and daiso cherry profile ppt keycaps i think that opening doors to a lot more potential keycaps at designs and if any key is cheaper than gmk i hope that covers everything you can know about custom key caps if you have any questions leave a comment down below and i'll get back to you if you like this video please give it a like and subscribe to stay updated on my future content until next time

Channel: Jimmy Nguyen

Views: 113,284

Rating: 4.956347 out of 5

Keywords: custom, keycaps, mechanical, keyboard, gmk, kat, sa, dsa, oem, cherry, infinikey, mt3, drop, massdrop, xda, kam, gaming, typing, abs, pbt, doubleshot, dye, sub, best, profile, kbdfans, pc, customization, novelkeys, cannonkeys, test, mauve

Id: PkXZLs7zzHk

Length: 23min 30sec (1410 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020