Before I start, I just want to apologise for being slow on this one, I had a bunch of things
going on, and I did plan to get this out before their Wooting Two Kickstarter campaign finished,
and this world cup prediction for laughs is now completely irrelevant, as Belgium decided
to lose against France.
Anyway, today we’re going to paint this Wooting One Analog mechanical keyboard.
The Wooting One is their tenkeyless keyboard, but they will soon have the Wooting Two, which
will be their full sized.
It’s quite a simple design.
We have an all black aesthetic, with an aluminium top mounting plate, and a plastic base, subsequently
making the keyboard quite light.
The keycaps aren’t the best, being thin 1mm ABS caps that are coated in black and
then laser etched.
Plus they’re massive fingerprint magnets with their matte black finish.
Of course the main attraction are the Flaretech Analog keyswitches, in which can sense how
far the key has been pushed.
My one is decked out with their light linear switch, and they’re actually quite smooth,
but they’re quite wobbly with the top housing being a bit too loose, and there is movement
between the switch and the plate.
So hopefully the paint can help with that just a bit.
It’s not the greatest typing experience, as it feels quite empty and hollow to me,
but we’ll try and help that later.
First step is the disassembly.
The keyboard is simply held together by a couple of Phillips head screws.
And since we’re painting the plate, we’re going to have to remove all the keycaps.
The cool thing about the Wooting keyboards, is that these Flaretech analog keyswitches
can be pulled out without the need of desoldering work, by using the keyswitch puller tool we
got in the box.
We then need to take out the plate mount stabilisers.
All we need to do is press in the tabs, and push up, and they easily pop out.
So here’s the empty aluminium plate, in which is anodised in black.
I’m not some paint expert, so I’m not exactly sure what the go is with painting
over anodised aluminium.
I’ve read that it’s not the best for paint adhesion for various reasons.
So if you were to spray paint directly, it potentially may not stick well depending on
the can you use.
I tried to sand it with 240 grit wet and dry sandpaper to rough it up a bit and get rid
of the finish.
But it wasn’t doing a whole lot, so I kinda just stopped, and went straight to priming.
Basically, primer promotes adhesion, so that the paint will stick better to the surface.
And it also helps fill in small gaps and scratches.
If you want to get all legit, you would have plastic primer for the plastic, and etch primer
for the metal.
But to save money, you can just get some standard all round primer.
You want to try and spray when it’s not too cold.
I feel like maybe 15 degrees celcius and above is pretty good.
Otherwise the paint just doesn’t dry and stick properly, and you end up with an orange
peel effect.
I’m spraying from about 15-20cm away, and doing even light to medium coats.
As you can see, it’s not great to paint outside when it’s windy, as it’s harder
to control.
Plus I was doing it in the sun since it was pretty cold.
And I did 3 coats of that, with some light sanding in between with some 800 grit wet
and dry sandpaper.
We want to sand in between coats to get rid of any lumps, bumps, scratches, dust, etc.
But yeh, primer is very forgiving anyway, as it is meant to be sanded.
Ok so now to the actual colour paint.
For my world cup prediction, again in which is wrong, I tipped Belgium to win, and that
was before they versed Brazil by the way.
So I’m going with black, yellow, and red.
Painting is much the same as with the primer.
I have some different brands of paint here, just basically what I had.
Try to not get the cheapest paint possible, as there is a difference in performance.
The easiest finish is a textured satin finish.
A smooth matte finish is a bit more difficult.
And then a glossy finish would probably be the most difficult.
For this, I’m just going to go with the simple textured satin finish.
Again, I’m about 15-30cm away.
And doing light to medium passes.
It’s always better to underspray then to overspray.
So don’t go too hard too quick, otherwise you’ll just give yourself more sanding to
do.
After the last coat, I let it sit for like 2 minutes, and then went ahead and removed
the tape, so that there won’t be any potential peeling with the paint drying over the tape.
Having a closer look though, we can see that the paint didn’t really stick well, so it
kind of curdled, leaving some gaps.
Meaning that I just sand it back a bit, again with just some 800 grit sandpaper.
And then proceed to paint again.
The red can of paint is an example of a more expensive paint, and shows how much easier
it goes on.
It’s much more even, and colours the surface quicker.
Now this is where I hit some real hurdles.
First of all, the yellow can of paint was absolute rubbish.
I had to do a heap of coats to actually have any effect.
So I did overspray, and that seeped through the tape, making for a fuzzy line.
And I also missed one important step, which was sanding down the lines from the black
and red.
Because when you paint over it, you end up seeing those lines.
And the final step is to apply a top clear coat, which will protect the paint.
It isn’t invincible though, and will still be scratched somewhat easily.
And this is yet again pretty much the same thing.
I’m using a satin clear coat, but you can buy matte or gloss as well.
I ended up going with about 5 light to medium coats.
Now to the bottom piece.
It’s quite a complicated shell, especially with the cable routing channel, and this isn’t
ideal for painting, as you can end up with paint build up if you truly try to cover everything.
This also makes it difficult to sand evenly, so I’m going to skip that step, and go straight
to priming.
And I’m not going to absolutely cover that cable routing channel, but you can if you
want.
For the colour, I’m going with gold, in which they unfortunately did not acquire.
But you get the theme.
Metallic paints tend to be the easiest to use in my opinion, as the speckles and stuff
kind of hide imperfections.
Now to put it all together.
Before I
mentioned that it felt quite empty and hollow when typing.
One thing that some keyboards have to help with that is foam on the inside.
Because of the excessive plastic ribbing, it’s pretty difficult to just stuff a piece
of foam in, so I cut up a bunch and tried to fill up a couple of the spaces.
All of the silver screws are used to secure the USB port and the PCB to the plastic shell.
The black screws are for
the top.
And here it is all done.
The Belgian Flag, with a gold base.
Because of time, I’m not very pleased with the actual finish.
Be patient, and take your time, and you will get better results.
So I kinda failed in being an actual guide.
The can of yellow paint was absolute rubbish, and I had to apply quite a bit of it, so it
has an ugly orange peel look.
But the black and red look and feel great, besides that little chip.
Again, painting is all about patience, and that’s not something I had.
The gold base turned out great though.
I wasn’t going for aesthetics at all with this paint job, but the gold doesn’t actually
look too bad with the Belgian flag.
The lubed stabilisers make a huge difference, because out of the box they’re pretty bad.
I’m not 100% sure if the foam made a much of a difference.
I just can’t remember exactly how it felt in comparison, but at the moment, it doesn’t
feel too bad when typing now.
I feel that the bottom out feels more solid.
I think it’s just the keycaps holding it back, plus they get dusty and oily real quick
which is annoying.
But the Flaretech analog keyswitches are pretty cool.
They’re an optical switch that can sense how far you push down the key.
So you can change modes to utilise the different distances, which may be useful in some games,
like racing games if you want to use your keyboard.
You can also change the actuation distance in the software.
The RGB backlighting is super vibrant as well, as the stems themselves do light up a bit,
which is pretty cool.
And again, you have a bunch of lighting options in the software, with some pretty cool presets.
So yeh that’s how I painted the Wooting One.
I’d imagine the Wooting Two would be very similar, being just the full sized version.
And The keyboard is super easy to take apart which I appreciate.
This isn’t a review, but you can watch a bunch on YouTube already.
And for the record, I picked Belgium before they versed Brazil, so I did at least get
that right, but now I tip Croatia for the win.