Mechanical Keyboard + Laptop = Clacktop

A Lenovo Yoga with a mechanical keyboard, held up by its creator.

What do you do when your laptop keyboard breaks for the second time? Well, most people might use an external keyboard until they couldn’t take it anymore and bought a new machine. But [Marcin Plaza] isn’t most people.

It took more than twelve hours of CAD, but [Marcin] redesigned the case to be at least twice as thick as the Lenovo Yoga that inspired this project in order to accommodate a slimmed-down mechanical keyboard. Further weight-loss surgery was required in order to make the keyboard fit, but the end result is kind of a marvel of engineering. It’s marriage of sleek modernity and early laptop chonky-ness, and we love it.

Lacking a complete metal fab shop of one’s own, [Marcin] elected to have a board house fab it out of titanium and was quite surprised by the result. We really like the clear acrylic bottom, into which [Marcin] drilled many holes for airflow. Be sure to check out the build and demo video after the break.

Did you initially wonder whether the new case was printed? That’s totally a thing, too.

Thanks to [Katie] for the tip!

20 thoughts on “Mechanical Keyboard + Laptop = Clacktop

  1. I love seeing a laptop with a real keyboard, all those modern fancy stuff laptops are made to be as thin as a razor blade and not for typing comfort, small rectangular pieces of plastic made to look nice and clean but impossible to type on with slippery pizza fingers during a serious session of true late night programming frenzy.

    PS: 12 hours, I can only whish that my CAD skills were that fast and result in something that’s right the first time. Cool project and nicely done!

        1. My brand new Razer laptop has an internal battery and it charges up to 4.4 volts per cell! Between that and the all-metal case roasting the internals and externals all the time, the battery went spicy pillow within six months and has destroyed the trackpad.

          Please, PLEASE give me a modern machine built like the last of the IBM thinkpads. I don’t want thin and sleek, I want a machine meant for professionals to do real work on for *years* and that I can replace every part on. Bonus points if it’s heavy enough to use as a weapon.

  2. I won’t lie I had the same idea when the keyboard on my Asus TUF FX505DY died. Its a perfectly good machine otherwise, but the keyboard is ridiculously expensive for what it is (a simple chicklet keyboard) so it isn’t worth repairing.

    I gave up at the step where I had to model all the crazy number of different geometries of the motherboard and other assembly elements in CAD.

    One of these days though…

      1. I completely agree. Same for phones. Give me a fatter phone with a removable battery, microsd, and a freaking headphone jack.

        The extra couple mm of thickness makes no difference in your pocket.

  3. don’t mind me i’m just the old man in the corner saying

    my god laptops are empty these days. can you believe it!! empty!!! used to be a rat’s nest of overlapping logic boards and structural spinning media. STRUCTURAL SPINNING MEDIA!! now it’s just one motherboard, a battery, keyboard, touchpad, speakers, wifi antenna, display, and maybe two stub boards just to convert the peripheral I/O into ribbon cables. i don’t know about you but it’s been 14 years since i bought a laptop with even a spinning fan.

    structural spinning media!! take the HDD out of the center and the whole laptop goes floppy. jeesh did that really happen. it was all a dream. it was all a dream.

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