- This is either gonna look really cool,
or it'll be a very expensive mistake.
There's no in between.
(upbeat mysterious music)
In today's video, I'm gonna be painting
my mechanical keyboard.
Now I got this keyboard a few months ago
with two main reasons in mind, really.
One, I'd heard that mechanical keyboards
were more efficient and more ergonomical,
whatever, for typing on.
Yes, all that is great.
But also I'd seen a lot of really cool pictures
of mechanical keyboards online
with cool key caps, cool color schemes,
things like that,
and it just seemed like something that I wanted to have
sitting on my desk.
I've got the Varmillo v88 mechanical keyboard
with what I believe are silent red switches.
And I've struggled to find a good key set for it,
'cause I have the Mac version,
'cause I wanted all the Mac function keys and everything.
I had the idea that maybe I could paint my own.
My idea is that I wanna paint
sort of like just around the sides of the keys
in a cool color.
And I've actually picked up three different colors here.
I've got a blue, a pink, and a purple,
and my idea is to sort of make it like a gradient,
looking up through the keyboard
and go from blue to purple to pink.
At least that's the idea,
that's what we're gonna try.
I've watched a few YouTube videos
with advice for painting,
and I'm essentially just gonna try
and follow along with them today,
and we'll see how we go.
I've started off by removing all of the keys,
which was a very fun (laughs) experience
in and of itself,
and I took a photo beforehand as well,
so that I don't forget which order they all go in,
'cause don't trust my memory on that.
The first thing that I need to do,
according to the tutorial that I saw,
is to sand the edges down.
So I'm gonna sand them,
then I'm gonna mask off the top and the bottom,
and then we're gonna prime them and paint them.
Let's see how this goes.
(upbeat rock music)
(sandpaper scratching)
Oh man, so doing all that sanding
and sticking the tape on these keys
took a lot longer than I expected.
I mean, I don't know why I expected this
to be a quick task,
'cause there are 88 keys, after all, on the keyboard.
At least, I think that's correct.
Anyway, all the keys are now nicely taped up.
Hopefully it'll mean that paint doesn't get through
onto the top layer,
because the reason that I am doing this
like painted sides instead of a full painted key
is so that I don't have to think about
how to get the symbols back on top
(laughs) once I cover it up with paint.
So yeah, my hope is
that things won't bleed under the side.
I don't know, I'm sure they'll be a bit of mess to clean up,
and we'll tackle that when we come to it.
But anyway, the first step
is to prime it with plastic primer,
so I've done that,
and it's all dry,
and not looking a whole lot different.
The primer was clear,
which I wasn't expecting.
I thought it would maybe have a color to it,
but anyway, that's what we got,
and now it is time to get painting.
This is the scary part, so let's go (laughs).
(upbeat rock music)
Okay, I don't wanna speak too soon,
but I feel like this has gone pretty well.
I've just done a little bit of inspecting them
and touching up where it seemed necessary.
I don't know yet
if the lines have ended up
clean on the top like I hoped,
but we'll find out.
The colors are looking so cool.
I'm really happy with the spray paint
I was able to find.
And this is the order it's gonna go
on the keyboard as well,
so it's gonna flow from blue to purple to pink, yeah.
Okay, it's the next day, the keys are all dry,
and it's time to put on the top coat.
We'll see how this goes.
I can already tell from looking at these keys
that there's a couple of places
where the paint seeped underneath.
Like, can you see there?
So I'm gonna have to deal with that (laughs).
There might need to be some sanding involved
to try and get around it.
But yeah, I'm gonna give these all a top coat now,
and then we'll take the tape off once that dries
and see where we're at
and what fixes we need to make.
I'm still hoping this turns out well.
(upbeat rock music)
Okay, so I'm kind of regretting
putting the varnish on, honestly,
because it looks fine in most places,
but every now and then,
there's one side where the varnish seems to have,
I don't know, made it go all puckery,
there we go, can you see it there?
So I don't know what to do about this.
There's only a few keys that are affected,
and it's mostly the pink ones, interestingly enough.
So maybe the pink just doesn't like the varnish.
But yeah, there's just this little bit of puckering
on some keys.
I'm gonna try, see how it can go sanding it down.
Yeah, I don't know, repainting, revarnishing,
whatever's needed there,
just 'cause I feel like I want it
to look a little bit better than this.
Let's try that next.
(upbeat rock music)
I think this whole sanding down thing is gonna work.
As I go through, I'm gonna inspect each key,
take the tape off it,
and set it to one side
if I feel like it's good to go
and good to be put back on the keyboard,
and to a different side
if it needs some work done.
This one here just needed some touching up at the bottom
where it was sort of stuck to the tape.
But check it out, this is a little pink-sided
7 key, and I think it's really cute.
- [Effects Track] Awww!
- It's turned out how I wanted,
I'm really excited about that.
So this is going in the good pile.
These ones (laughs),
Needs Work pile.
(light upbeat music)
And this, my friends, is the finished keyboard.
I am so happy with how this turned out.
It's almost exactly what I had in mind.
There's definitely a little places
where, if you look closely, especially,
you can see that things aren't perfect,
but that's okay, I'm all right with it.
This was a DIY method,
I was expecting things to not be absolutely perfect.
I got them as good as I could,
and it was a very, very time-consuming project,
but a fun one to tackle.
I've been using my beautiful painted keyboard
for a couple of weeks now,
so that's why there's been a gap in time,
and you might notice that my hair color has faded a lot
(laughs) since the last clip,
but it's been holding up well
to my incredibly aggressive at times typing
that I do on this keyboard.
So I'm really happy with the overall quality
and the time that I invested
in bringing this project to life.
(upbeat rock music)
I've had a lot of people ask me
just about mechanical keyboards in general
and why I prefer to use one,
and, like I said at the start,
I really did want a cool-looking keyboard.
That was part of the reason why
I got into a mechanical keyboard, not gonna lie.
But having this keyboard out of action for a while
while I was doing all the painting of the keys
and having to go back to the Apple keyboard,
I realized just how much nicer it is
to type on this in general, too.
So I know people have been asking about that,
so that's my general thoughts on mechanical keyboards.
If you would wanna tackle a project like this yourself
after seeing this video,
then I really wanna recommend
that you watch the channel
that I learned these techniques from.
I'll leave a link to that in the description box
so you can check that out.
On that channel, he definitely goes into way more detail
and is much better about this in general than me,
so would highly recommend you watch.
It's fun to have this little element of customization
as part of my computer hardware setup.
Makes me happy every time I'm looking down
to type at it,
and that's the goal at the end of the day.
I want things in my office that make me happy.
That's why my walls look like this.
Thanks for watching this video.
I hope you enjoyed coming along on this journey with me,
despite how time-consuming it was,
like sanding everyone of those 88 keys several times,
and then having to redo some.
It was a lot, but no regrets.
I'm glad I did it,
very happy with the results,
and, like I said, hope you enjoyed
seeing the journey along the way.
Give the video a thumbs up if you did enjoy it
and if you'd be interested in seeing more, like,
I don't know, hands-on projects like this in future,
if there is ones that I decide to take on.
Hope you have a good day and a good week,
and I promise in the next video,
we will get back to
specifically talking about web design.
So I will see you then, bye.
(light upbeat music)