The Royal Quack

This is a stupid keyboard and I love it. I was trying to find a use for my NovelKeys Box Royal Switches, an extremely tactile box switch from novelkeys. Low and Behold a friend just gave me his Ducky One keyboard, a decent keyboard in of itself, and I knew what I /had/ to do. I must make the most royal of keyboards, and thus the Royal Quack was born. It still makes me laugh just thinking about it. The build is subject to my standard cheap teardown and rebuild skills, Case and Plate get painted and switches on the pcb get replaced. Ok so it's not /that/ cheap but it definitely is fun. In this case I painted the case a nice rich purple, while finding some type of hammered metal gold color to paint the steel switchplate. The crowning feature however, has to be a random set of keycaps I found on Amazon. A type extremely obnoxious plated gold color abs double shot backlight keycaps that are both slippery and an eyesore. In otherwords pretty perfect for this keyboard.

PCB Breakdown: 

• MCU:
• Firmware: Proprietary Ducky
• Format: Full Size
• Layouts: Ansi 108 key
• Connection: 5 Pin USB connector breakout
• Switch Compatibility: MX plate
• Backlighting: Per Switch THT LED
• Underlighting: N/A
• Audio: N/A

Switches:

• NovelKeys Box Royal Switches
• Tactile
• Travel: 3.6mm
• Acuation: 40g
• Bottom out Force: 70g
• Links: product page
• These specific switches are pre-stem fix.

I didn't have enough Royal switches for a whole keyboard but I was able to cover all the alpha-numerics and mod keys. For the Function keys and others I used some Kaihua Pro Purples. Ok now about the Royal switches. They came out of the gate swinging to be tactile and boy did they accomplish that. It feels like every one of your fingers is punching the switches they push down. It's a load of fun and I really like these switches tho I believe some people may find them to be a little harsh since you pretty much have to bottom out due to the force needed to overcome the bump.

Keycaps:

• Material: ???
• Profile: ???

While hilarious these keycaps are terrible! The coating actually makes them kind of slippery and when I was playing some games my fingers just ended up slipping. So good for a joke, not so great for actually typing. I also have a set of cheap abs kaps I rubberized and painted over with less shiny gold paint but at least they don't slip and slide! The profile of the caps is roughly OEM with some interesting mixups like a numpad 2 key being an upsidedown higher row profile? Not sure what's happening there but was defintely worth a good laugh.

Case and Plate:

• Case Material: Plastic
• Feet/Stands: Flip out Feet
• Plate Material: Steel

Bom and Cost:

 total cost: ~$80