Hand wired a southpaw 1800(-ish) keyboard with no stabilizers
Time+3D printer+laser engraver=keeb
I had these cheap clone keycaps lying around, and I've been wanting to try a southpaw, as well as a no-stabs board that can accommodate sculpted keycap profiles, so here we are. Had to make a few compromises on layout to fit the keycaps I had on hand, but it's feeling pretty usable so far. Outemu dustproof green for MOAR CLICKY.
Right. For some of my other weird layout, homemade boards, I’ve done all the keycap legends myself, but for this one, I wanted it to be able to use sculpted key cap sets where each row has a different shape, and using “normal” caps necessitated a few compromises.
Functionally, this is not meant to be a particularly weird board, well apart from the numpad being compressed and on the left. No single key is more than 1.75 times the width of a normal key, which means I did not need to use any stabilizing hardware under them.
As somebody else noted, the second “caps lock” is really enter, and then I just have the four upside down ones on the bottom row mapped as space bars. A more generous set of keycaps could have the exact ones you might need in size and shape and label for even a weird layout, but this cheap set from Amazon worked out mostly OK. Flipping the space bars also helps with the typing angle, when you don’t have proper space bars for the size you need.
This changes the angle at which they meet your thumb. Many find this configuration more comfortable when they use mods instead of a spacebar kit. I do this too.
I’m not actually left-handed, but a lot of people like the southpaw style to keep the num pad around and integrated, but allow the mouse to stay close to the right side of the keyboard. I’m not sure what I think of the concept so far, but it came out pretty well, given the constraints I gave myself.