Paperclips!

Published on 2019-11-17 in Flounder Keyboard.

Since the regular plastic key stabilizers were simply too big, no matter how much I whittled them down with a knife, I had to come up with something completely different. The inspiration came from an older stabilizer design that I saw in Alpen Clack , where the key just had a kind of horizontal slit in which the wire of the stabilizer would move. So first of all, I needed a way to hold the stabilizer wire:

That was easily achieved by a simple hook made of the same paperclip wire. Next, I needed that horizontal channel — I thought  can simply use the surface of the key cap, and add something to hold it from the bottom. Gluing a bit of wire in the right place seems to work well enough for this.

Now just bend the stabilizing wire at the ends to hook into those channels, and voila, it works!

I repeated the same process for the shift and enter keys. Enter was a bit tricky, because there wasn’t enough room for the channel — I had to cut out the “+” sockets for the “proper” stabilizers to make space. I still need to do this for the backspace key, however that will wait for a better USB cable — right now the temporary cable I have is taking up all the space under the key, actually making it difficult to press, but I already have a thinner one on order.