When building my first keyboard I wanted a challenge, and to experience the keyboard building community in its entirety. This is why I decided to build my first keyboard entirely from scratch without following any guides or advice. In hindsight I sort of regret this as the overall build wasnt amazing, however im glad I did it because it taught me so much about the community as a whole

Components-

This keyboard was originally built as a standard 60% layout based on the dz60 pcb, I decided to use this PCB as it is well documented and versatile, along with having a USB-C connection port which was very important to me when building. I combined this with some Cherry MX Black switches and then various other parts such as cases and keycaps to complete the build. Overall I was happy with the result however I disliked the switches and hated not having a delete key.

I then rebuilt the keybopard using a new plate from KeebCats, this allowed me to use a new 65% layout. To create this the left shift is reduced in size to 2U (the size of 2 regular keycaps) By doing this I gained enough space to have an extra 3 keys on the right side of the board. This meant that I could now have arrow keys and a delete key again.

The Second Build

Following an unfortunate incident with a soldering iron which resulted in a dead PCB I decided to build a whole new board, it was a few days after this incident that a new keyboard launched called the KBD67 V3. I bought this new board on release and built it on release with some new switches that I figured I would like more. I decided on the KTT Strawberries from KeebCats thanks to their light actuation force and excellent sound.

The layout of this keyboard is a 67% design, this is extremely similar to the 65% however features 4 extra keys on the right side as you can see in the pictures below. This allows me to have extra keys that I was missing such as macros to open file explorer and the grave key. This is by far my favourite layout as it features all the things I actually need whilst using my keyboard in a compact and aesthetic space.