On the 26th of August, Melbourne had their 3rd Mechanical Keyboard Meetup of the year,
and I made my way down there, with a quick 1 hour plus flight south of Sydney.
I’ve said this before, but mechanical keyboard meetups are events set up by members of the
community, and is a great place to see, feel, and experience a whole range of mechanical
keyboards and accessories.
But also to get to meet and talk with other people with the same interests, and get to
see people you might have talked to online.
You can usually see these meetups on the Mechanical Keyboard Subreddit which shows the upcoming
events, and I’ll link that in the description below.
This one was setup by my friend at Daily Clack.
You can check out his Instagram page and website where he regularly posts mechanical keyboards
and other tech.
I was told there was like 30 or so last time, but they more than doubled the attendance
this time round, and it proved to be quite overwhelming for the small room we had, and
made it pretty tough to film.
But I was super impressed with how many people turned up, and it’s just great to see the
interest and enthusiasm in the community.
Alright so let’s just get into some boards.
There were a tonne of boards, so unfortunately I can’t verbally go through all of them,
so my apologies.
We’ll start off with the smaller ones at 40%, with this Mechmini with a clean black
aesthetic, and a large spacebar just because.
And the Vortex Core which is a ready made board that you can get, and comes with these
sweet DSA keycaps by default.
We have just a few ortholinear keyboards.
This one is a solid aluminium NIU from KBDfans, and is themed beautifully with blank pink
DSA keycaps, Kailh Speed Pink keyswitches which use a click bar creating super crisp
typing experience.
And to finish it off, a pink cable and artisan.
This ortho from OLKB is the Preonic.
And features a larger 12 x 5 layout which is mounted onto a steel plate and closed off
with some hardwood ends.
This one is an even larger ortho at 14 x 5.
The enclosure is a sandwich style case made from acrylic, with of course a clear layer
at the bottom to see the wonderful handwiring, which is done up to a Teensy.
And he also has this cool little LED circle for that bit of lighting.
And then the only other ortholinear board, which happened to be the 1 of the just 2 split
keyboards there was this Wireless Split Planck or planck with Gateron Blacks.
The PCBs were made by Spindle, and this is just a great little project, just using 2
metal plates to hold it together.
The other split keyboard was this Ergodox Infinity, packed with 62g Zealio’s and topped
with DSA Granite keycaps.
Just a great piece as always with the sandwiched acrylic case and clear bottom to get a clear
view of the PCB.
And surprisingly that was it for the splits.
When enthusiasts come together, there’s always gonna be a bunch of Topre keyboards.
And the HHKB had a solid presence as always.
This HHKB had a unique look with some tasty Blizzard smoke mods, some blue alphas, and
some matching artisans on the flanks.
This one is the super clean black version, but also had some mods to really make it pop
in those vibrant miami colours.
There were also some JP HHKBs, with this one having the Hi Pro keycaps on there which feel
and look absolutely amazing.
Plus it had a bunch of mods and it houses a Hasu controller, which all really bring
out most of the potential of the HHKB.
This one had a solid cohesive colour scheme going on, with is what I assume are dyed keycaps.
Then we have a couple of artisans to match creating quite a vibrant board.
There were 2 Realforces with this one being for sale, which had a bunch of mods done to
it.
And the other one had a dark red and black theme happening, with the perfectly matching
keycaps.
And there was actually a Leopold FC980C, which is again also a Topre board, but I’ve never
actually got to try one before.
I love the layout of this board, and the classic white and grey colour scheme with a few touches
of colour looks great.
And of course some RAMA caps for good measure.
There was also some Cooler Master Novatouches with the Topre switches in them.
This one had fake Dolch DSA caps.
And then this one had an aftermarket aluminium Norbauer case with some really nice keycaps
on it.
Finally there was just the 1 Topre clone I think.
And this was the Plum Nano 75.
And I personally really liked this one because of just how light and fluffy it looked, especially
with that reactive lighting.
And then of course there were all the other 60% boards, being pretty much the most accessible
and customisable keyboards you can get.
While looking pretty simple.
This was packing a Zeal60 PCB with Zealio keyswitches, an aluminium case, and topped
with the GMK terminal set, making for an understated but superb keyboard.
Here’s another Zeal60 PCB, but this time in a nice blue aluminium case and a cute set
of Vamilo rainbow keycaps.
This GH60 was in a HHKB layout and had the GMK Skeletor set, and just had a simple sandwich
plate with that floating key design.
And then above that was a Duck Viper V2 with the beautiful Hyperfuse SA keycaps - featuring
a massively long spacebar, and a perfectly matching Cosmo artisan.
And this thing is a nice solid piece of aluminium with acrylic slits for a bit of glow, and
it just looks so clean and well put together.
The Royal Kludge RK61 isn’t something I’ve covered yet, and is often overlooked.
But these Danger Zone SA keycaps just look amazing and completely has your attention
with the very minimal bezel the case has.
Then there was this solid metal brick.
This Duck Mini Replica had a beautiful set of Maxkey SA Orange Dolch keycaps.
And of course had a real chunky thick case, like just look at that backside.
It doesn’t really make sense, but it doesn’t matter.
Even back in the day we had Apple making this gem of a board.
And this is the M0110 from 1984 with that classic and beautiful angular enclosure design
which is timeless in my opinion.
And then for 60%’s you can’t go wrong with the classic Pokers and the budget friendly
Anne Pro.
Now this was a super interesting board for me.
This is the Bleach60 which is a PCB by Dr.NU, and has SMK and Aruz switch compatibility.
This one has SMK 2nd gen white MX switches, with a set of Milky Way keycaps.
But then we turn it over and we have some mad hand done art on the aluminium case.
The owner said that he’s going to get this laser etched in the future, so that’s gonna
be awesome.
65% boards are also a really popular layout and form factor because of their balance between
functionality and size.
This ALU64 had EnjoyPBT Hangul for the keycaps and some CMYK mods, giving it some vibrance.
From Varmilo we of course have the ever popular VA68 boards.
But these ones were extra special.
First is this VA68mg which is the magnesium alloy version, and this is the Valentines
day edition, appropriately fitted with GMK Valentine keycaps.
But then we have this VA68Cu which is a copper alloy version.
And this is from the same person by the way.
And being copper, this thing is packing some weight at about 1.8 to 1.9 kilograms.
And I just love the look of it as well.
There wasn’t much of Alps, but this VA68M had SKCM Cream damped Alps.
So this is just an aftermarket PCB to accommodate the ALPS switches, and of course the wonderful
AEK keycaps, as standard MX keycaps aren’t compatible.
Here’s another popular 65% in the Leopold FC660M.
But this one has an aftermarket aluminium case in this very sleek dark blue.
Not sure what’s the go with the white keys, but still awesome nonetheless.
This FC660M had the standard plastic case, which is also great looking by the way.
And has DSA granite keycaps which just never fails to look good.
The TADA68 is perhaps one of the most popular DIY kits in the market.
And this one has the cyan aluminium case, and then packed with a variety of different
keycaps, including an Open spacbar, and CNC’d aluminium caps from Salvun.
This Smart 68 was one I missed, but has a bunch of stuff done to it, with a really interesting
set of keycaps.
And of course the good old budget Magicforce 68.
One of my favourite budget boards because of what it represents.
But this is one of the best ones I’ve seen, amazingly with GMK Hydro.
Being in Melbourne, the RAMA pair were there with a bunch of cool stuff.
Here’s the amazing M65 which is partially covered by the really sweet looking SA Grand
Budapest set.
Unfortunately he doesn’t have the PCB for it.
And above it, there’s an example of the black version, and also the Brass weight which
sits on the underside of the keyboard.
Just an amazing feeling and looking keyboard, it’s just unfortunate that I couldn’t
try it out in it’s final form.
There was also this 60% which was just a great piece.
And this also had some prototype keycaps of some different profile.
And there was no shortage of the RAMA M10 pads from different people.
This one in particular went full RAMA, and people who are familiar with stuff will know
how pretty crazy this is.
This one also had some super sweet artisans, from SVSN keycaps.
The person there was selling them as well, and they just had really great detail to them,
plus looking super appetising, which is probably a bad thing.
There was also a bunch of switch testers, including this thing.
We also had some cool special Melboure Meetup macropads by Amtra5, which house 1 switch
and a pro micro.
I also have one from Sydney, and it’s a great collection piece to have.
All right, so now to finish it of we have 75% and above.
This is an MX Mini from 22KBD, with a sandwich style case using 2 aluminium pieces and an
acrylic midde, and features DSA Granite, which yet again doesn’t fail to look good.
There were a few KBD75 boards, which feature a solid aluminium case, with an acrylic slit
towards the bottom.
This one had a sweet set of GMK Dolch.
And this one had a variety of keycaps, including an artisan.
Unfortunately I missed this one, but this XD64 had a bent plate case, with a heap of
mods with the insides, and topped with SA Photo Studio.
Probably one of the brighter keyboards was this Ducky Shine 3 with this bright yellow
case, which happened to go well with the SA Godspeed keyset, and just makes for a really
fun looking keyboard which I like.
This set of GMK Penumbra was on a Filco Majestouch 2, which as always is just a solid board.
This Duck Blackbird was another with a load of different things going on.
It has a sweet layout with JTK orange on black keycaps.
This thing probably cost quite a bit with all these different parts, but the end result
was amazing to see and feel.
Another heavyweight was this Red Scarf 96, with a super clean set of GMK Soware caps.
There’s also underglow on the rear, but yeh, I really do want to eventually get a
board with this layout, as we basically get a full sized board but in pretty much a tenkeyless
form factor.
This keyboard was stunning with that unique layout, which is basically a 65% board plus
the function keys on the left.
The DSA Lightcycle keyset really makes this board as well, along with the matching artisan
and cable.
Here’s a pair of Varmilo Boards that were given away for the raffle with that super
clean centred typeface.
And for some reason these Silent Red’s in particular felt really really good.
And to rap up the boards, we have a couple of older ones, which I really don’t know
much about.
One thing I realised is that Split keyboards were scarce, including the Ergodox’s which
tend to feature quite a bit.
But the amount of high end stuff here was amazing to see.
Just metal everywhere, a whole lot of different sizes and layouts.
And of course the keycaps.
It’s nice to get to see all these keysets that you always see online, but of course
you can’t afford.
But again, a mechanical keyboard is a mechanical keyboard.
All these boards can be pretty overwhelming, but you don’t need these extreme boards
to come to these events, so don’t ever feel like you can’t attend.
And that’s pretty much it.
I just love the concept of meetups, and it’s just a great time to converse and check everything
out, even if you’re a beginner or don’t have a board, because you won’t get this
sort of opportunity to help you in deciding what to get.
The amount that you’re able to try can really give you ideas and inspiration on what you
might like.
There’s constantly meetups around the world which I’ll link below, so definitely try
get to one, including the upcoming Sydney one at the end of the year.
So overall it was a great success and a great event.
The attendance was amazing, and was unexpected, hence the small room.
And sorry if I missed your board, I got real lazy towards the end, and it was real tough
to squeeze through and get everything.
A huge thanks to Rhys at Dailyclack, and the others who helped him out in organising the
meetup.
You guys did a super job with organising everything with the venue, the posters, cards, all the
little giveaway stuff, and of course the absolutely loaded raffle.
But the raffle wasn’t possible without all the generous sponsors.
It’s this support and kindness that drives the community, and it was greatly appreciated.
And finally thanks to everyone who filled up the identification cards, it really makes
my job easier.
And the good people on Discord for helping me with identifying some things.