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Comment by leohonexus | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful, but it’ll be a pain to find contract manufacturers willing to do that keycap design. From the render I can already count 8 different injection molds required, which doesn’t sound feasible for a low-volume production run. You'd either have to price it very aggressively or be advised by your manufacturers during DFM to use standard low-profile keycaps instead.

For folks curious about keyboard manufacturing, Jesse from Keyboardio wrote an entire crash course on it with his Model 01 Kickstarter updates: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/keyboardio/the-model-01...

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There is already a prototype with these keycaps so I guess he did find somebody already. The price will be…. Interesting though

Is there or are those all renders?

The OP responds elsewhere that the prototypes are 3d printed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32513522

Is it known why the molds have not gone down in price? Or is it another chicken and egg problem? (customers don't order molds because it is expensive and look for off the shelf components, companies don't invest in making molding more affordable, because there is not enough customers...)

I watch some of the machinist YouTubes so can venture a guess…

Molds need super high precision CNC machines because any flaws will show up in the parts. So think expensive. And they aren’t going to be giving away machine time any time soon.

On guy I saw who was being interviewed had such a machine he bought second hand from (I believe) UC Berkeley and it was something like one out of three that were ever imported to the US. I guess it was a popular machine to make cell phone cases back in the day and Berkeley ended up with one for some reason.

Because you are designing and producing a one-off items. Basically, you are engineering a tool which allows you to shoot molten plastic at high pressure into tiny cavities, with tolerances smaller than a tenth of a millimeter for the end product. That's not at all trivial and therefore unaffordable, unless you are building molds which will be used to create tens, if not hundreds of thousands of copies.

The cheap option is to reuse an existing mold, mostly by asking a manufacturer to create keycaps in an existing profile, but in a color of your choice. That's what almost everyone in the keyboard industry does.

I agree with the OP. Either they have to sell tens of thousands of this keyboard, or it is going to be priced in the high-hundreds or even low thousands of $.

I have a keycap in mind, but what scares me is a mistake in the design. I give the model to the manufacturer, they create a mold, do a sample run and it turns out e.g. the stem is 0.1mm too wide, so it is too loose. Then make another mold, this time it is 0.05mm too narrow etc. They gave me advice to create a model and order a 3D print to ensure it fits right, but I am not sure if 3D print will have a good enough precision. When I was 3D printing at home I was never able to get exact dimensions - print was either 0.99999x scale or 1.005x scale etc. I fear that a simple thing could turn out into multiplies of £10k and months of back and forth.

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