Producing An Exquisite Wooden Keyboard

Keyboards! They’ve been almost universally made out of plastic since the dawn of the microcomputer era. Meanwhile, wood is a rather desirable material and it lends itself rather well to touch-heavy human interface devices. As [ProcessX] shows us, though, it can take quite a bit of work to fabricate a keyboard entirely out of this material.

The video shows us the construction of a Japanese wooden keyboard from Hacoa, which retails for around $1000 USD. The video shows us how the wooden housing is produced from start to finish, beginning with the selection of some fine walnut. From there, we get to see how the frame is routed out and machined, along with the more delicate work to create all the keycaps out of wood, too. They’re laser engraved to give them high-quality markings that will last the test of time. What we don’t see is the construction of the electronics—it appears that’s handled separately, and the wooden frame and keycaps are then assembled around the otherwise complete existing keyboard.

It’s nice to see what it takes to produce commercial-quality parts like this out of wood. We’ve seen other wooden keyboard builds before, too.

[Thanks to John for the tip!]

13 thoughts on “Producing An Exquisite Wooden Keyboard

  1. I under that the Japanese take pride in their woodworking, like many of their trades each has their own jargon not taught in regular schools, but a person with moderate woodworking skills and a laser engraver could build a case and keycaps for less than $1K USD.
    If this is a negative comment, so be it. My laser engraver (usedl) cost $50, bandsaw (used) $180, shellac -free at the county recycling center. But I will admit making wooden CapsLock, and NumLock LEDs is above my pay grade!
    B^)

    1. Sometimes I think that we Germans used to have a similar mindset to the Japanese when it came to quality.
      Companies like Bosch valued quality, trust and a good reputation rather than quick money.
      Then our companies became more and more American, more and more international. Now “made in Germany” no longer has any meaning.
      I really hope the Japanese do better than us and learn from our mistakes.

      1. I do not think that the problem is that German companies became “american” they became the property of no one, thus no one takes pride in quality. The only pride the ceos take is in earning money to the share holders, if for that they have to sell it in pieces so be it. I work for a japanese company but the branch I am in is kind of autonomous, and here in DE. In my opinion, interested in quick bucks instead of good products, at least what I get from “all hands” meetings. I think quality is something like FuSa, if it is not backed in from the start then it is not there. But somethings filtered through, it is clear to me that quality (like FuSa) is something everyone contributes to :)

    2. Yeah, you can do it for yourself cheaper than that, as it rarely makes sense to put a price on hobby time. But I don’t think you could profitably sell these for less than $1k USD, at least not without cutting corners from the manual finishing and quality control time.

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