Drop Mech Keys Meetup Recap - Thanks for Visiting!
As you may have seen, we just hosted our first meetup in quite a while here at Drop HQ (Corsair HQ, but they seem to like us enough :) )! It was a blast to get to meet so many enthusiasts local to the bay area—it had been 10 years since I was last hanging out with keyboard nerds in the bay, at KeyCon 2014. We had a great time hosting everyone at the offices, checking out all the very nice boards y'all brought, and sharing some of our own projects/spaces! I knew it would be fun to host in the Game Room when I first saw it in person, but seeing it come to fruition was still so cool. Alright, I'll stop blabbering on now. xD Picture time! (Oh, real quick - there will be more of these! Stay tuned for more info and to catch the next one!)
May 15, 2024
What is Dye-sub? We covered this in our article about keycap materials, but a quick reminder before diving into what makes reverse dye-sub unique—dye-sub (dye sublimation) legends are legends which have been physically dyed into a PBT keycap, leaving a sub-surface legend that is incredibly resilient to wear and tear. Because you can’t dye a lighter color onto a darker color effectively, dye-sub keycaps have always required a lighter keycap base color than legend color. This is why most dye-sub sets are <color>-on-beige, sometimes spicing things up with a white, yellow, or other light color as the base keycap color.
What is Reverse Dye-sub? To work around the above limitations, it’s long been discussed that in theory, one could simply dye the *rest* of the keycap (dye the base, not the legend) using the dye-sub technique. This would leave the legend of the keycap an untouched lighter color, and create the desired effect of a light color on dark color keycap. Simple in theory, not-so-simple in execution. In order to dye the keycaps at scale, films covered with dye are stretched slightly to cover all applicable surfaces of the cap and ensure complete coverage across the contours of the non-flat keycap. For regular dye-sub processing, this is much more simple, since we’re only dyeing the top surface. Any stretching that is taking place is mostly minimal. In order to dye the entire outer surface of a keycap during reverse dye-sublimation, the film covered with dye needs to stretch to cover the entire surface of the keycap. This presents difficulties and hurdles to overcome to tool up for manufacturing, as well as challenges specific to each color and quality control. As you can imagine, stretching something lengthwise causes it to thin out—this thinning results in lighter colors applied to the product where the film is stretched more than where it’s not. We can combat this with heavier coatings overall (to minimize the difference) and scaling the coating thickness proportionally in the areas that will thin more.
What to expect from Reverse Dye-sub For some more details and specific examples of what to expect from the reverse dye-sub manufacturing process, please see the talk post ‘What to Expect from Reverse Dye-sub Keycaps’. Our next reverse dye-sub keycap sets? What are your favorite light-on-dark keycap sets that you’d like to see us produce with reverse dye-sub next?