***If you have a new shipping address please do email me to let me know your order numbers and the new address. Check your order email and our email communications (if applicable) to make sure the latest address I have on file for you is the correct one.
***For the Brand New Beam Spring Project launch information, please see a few posts before this one for details. As a reminder we are waiting to go through the new Model F keyboard backlog before the Brand New Beam Spring Project starts shipping, expected later this year. Sign up to reserve your spot if you haven’t done so already!
Project status summary – what has been going on lately, when is my keyboard shipping, etc.:
This section is nearly the same as other recent updates: For those who have not been following recent updates and frequent postings over on the Deskthority and geekhack project threads, I will note that there is still time to customize and order your Brand New Model F Keyboard and/or add on to your order with any accessories like the First Aid Kit for future repairs, solenoids and solenoid drivers, extra key sets, new production transparent relegendable keycaps (just introduced!), inner foam, extra flippers/springs, Model F key pullers, custom made 3 meter USB cables compatible with these keyboards, and other parts. Also I will note that the keyboards have started shipping – it does not mean that your keyboard will be shipping right away! There is still a ways to go to get everyone’s keyboard out.
To add accessories to an order that hasn’t shipped yet, you can place a new order and select the free/other shipping method at checkout, immediately before clicking Place Order. This way you can save on shipping – big savings especially for international shipping. However if in the US and if you can pay the shipping charge, please do so to help defray the significant project cost overruns. Everyone outside the US, feel free to contact me for a discounted international shipping quote if you are only ordering smaller items that ship separately. Otherwise they can ship with your keyboard if it hasn’t shipped already (can pick “other shipping” if that’s the case).
Regarding the shipping notification emails, everyone receives one as soon as your order ships.
There are not many new updates in the past month – the main focus is on preparing to mail out all orders in the container shipment, it will take several months until everything has been mailed out. Please review the prior updates below for other recent updates.
I expect to continue mailing out orders this year, so please refrain from asking me when your keyboard or key set will ship as I cannot estimate where any one order is in the queue. So far I have personally QCed, tested, and mailed out more than 1,900 Brand New Model F Keyboards all over the world!
March 2022 Current Project Status:
The container shipment with all of the remaining keyboards and parts departed in early February as we had hoped for, and it is currently at sea on a container ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s expected to arrive at the port and be delivered to me some time in the next few weeks, later this month. Once it arrives I will have a week or two of organization so that I know where each keyboard variation is located, and then I will start the QC process of personally testing and shipping more than 2,000 orders for keyboards and accessory parts as part of the current batch (it’s going to take me a few months as you can probably imagine!). As noted before the order is based on when you ordered and what extra support level you have chosen, if any.
***You can still order a keyboard and accessories as part of the early bird round this month, as I personally ordered lots of extras in anticipation of people ordering extra items to add onto their orders, along with extras of each keyboard variation type.
New keys now available: Zed has just created the F13-F24 keys for those F122 and M122 users – now available on the extra keys page.
To minimize production lead times for some orders after the container shipment set sail (and the same as with the prior order), I ordered extras of each variation from the factory; the current expectation is that orders can be fulfilled from this batch at least for the current month, but no I unfortunately won’t be able to check orders from here on out to see if they are in the current container shipment. There is always the chance that some variations run out quicker than others, or that the factory made the wrong case colors or that some parts were damaged, which happened in the prior two shipments, and that would affect what could ship. The final round orders will be in a future container shipment of course.
For those holding out for the final round expecting updated components, please note that the keyboards are going to be the exact same as in the current container shipment of keyboards, which had some slight updates described on the updates page of the project web site. One notable update is that all the keyboards will have a USB-C xwhatsit controller instead of the prior batch which was mixed USB-C and the older Micro-USB standard. So I recommend joining this month if you are waiting for the final production design revision.
All those who upgraded to the low serial option get to skip the line, as noted since the beginning of the project a while back, and those who ordered the premium serial options skip even more ahead in the line. There is still time of course to upgrade to low serial and skip the line if you place a new order and choose free/other shipping at checkout, right before clicking Place Order – no need to pay shipping if just ordering this upgrade and/or a few accessories.
The shipping container contents weigh over 20,000 pounds, including thousands of keyboards, key sets, and other accessory parts! As noted before the factory has improved their QC and assembled the first aid kits so this should save me a lot of time and help me to mail out everyone’s orders much faster than last time. Everything is expected to be ready to go this time and we are not waiting for dye sublimation to start like we were last time. As noted before I ordered slightly bigger keyboard boxes which will save the time of me taping up and mailing the little key set boxes.
The factory has completed the F1-F12 front print and Industrial SSK 12 key sets. Last month I mailed out the F1-F12 sets to those who were only waiting on that (for those waiting on the ISSK sets and/or other individual keys, I am waiting until everything is “all in stock” before anything ships. As of now, the remaining key sets and custom keys will be worked on while the container ship is sailing and will then be air mailed to me later this month, in time for when keyboards start shipping from the current container shipment.
Also I’m not sure if I will gift wrap every order in gray plastic wrap like in prior rounds. For a couple thousand keyboards that would save the equivalent of one week just in packing time. Many folks would personally prefer gift wrapping so as not to have a shipping label on the product box but I don’t want to hold up everyone’s orders since everyone has been waiting a while.
Here’s the process after the keyboards were completed: the container was delivered to the factory, the factory loaded the container with lots of pallets and boxes, and then the container was picked up by the local shipping partner of the freight forwarder to be driven to the port. Then the containers were loaded onto a container ship.
For this batch, a 40′ (!) container is filled to the edge, though the pallets are not double stacked (they are extra tall pallets and so could not be double stacked) so there is a few feet of clearance on top as shown in the photos. Prior container shipments were 20′ or LCL.
Pad Printed Keys Update:
While the keys for this project are dye sublimated, I have also been looking into pad printing a small batch of the black key sets with white text as a number of people have asked me about it. This is reminiscent of the IBM Model M 13H6705 keyboard, the only one with pad printed black keys to my knowledge. This is of course very low priority for this year. Pad printing can look nice but tends to wear down with usage.
If interested in black pad printed Model F / Model M keys please sign the interest form here: https://forms.gle/qnUATUrng8bX9Qxt8
Update on the ongoing Brand New Beam Spring project:
The beam reservations Google form linked to in an earlier update post is for the project in general – everyone needs to sign up whether they prefer the first or second round.
When we get closer I expect to put up some videos of the sound and operations to help folks decide. The advantage of the first round is not having to wait a year – having everything in stock, plus the full sound quality (extra reverberant and snappy) while the advantage of the second round will be more dampened sound quality like the original, as well as the redesigned more expensive case. Another consideration – the second round is expected to cost a bit more than the first given it has the extra case and because prices have gone up for a lot of manufactured goods over the past year, so it is likely that these won’t be able to be manufactured at the same cost.
Currently we are up to more than 900 reservations for the beam project! The cutoff point for the first round will all depend on how many folks choose the first round vs. the second round.
Feel free to contribute here to the second round beam spring case design and other topics: https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=26174&p=499137#p499137
Nice dye sublimation work:
Here is a photo from a recent air shipment. The factory did a great job with the sublimation and Zed has done a great job getting the legends to be in line with the IBM legends. This particular legend is even a deeper shade of black than my reference 1984 F122 6110344 one piece set! I did not expect that. The legend design, alignment, and sublimation are of such good quality that it is difficult for me to tell whether both keys were made by IBM or whether one is new and one is IBM. Please pardon the poorly lit, cell phone quality photo and shallow depth of field blurring the keys – I did not scan both keys with a flatbed scanner as with my prior comparisons.
It is a special additional key from a Norwegian set (as noted in the key set renderings on the “full key set” store page, many of the international sets come with extra keys that are slightly different, to accommodate the more variable keyboard legend options)
Nice Front Printing dye sub results:
The first batch of 200 front print keys arrived at the end of January. These are just the pearl F1-F12 US front printed keys. The keys came out well. As a note the alignment for the front printing is not as strong as the top alignment – this was true even for the IBM sublimated keys. The front printing has proven to be extremely difficult to even get to this point. The Industrial SSK blue 12 key sets and all the other front print sets will be completed over the coming weeks after the factory returns from their break.
New Model F production keys are on top of my IBM F122 in the below photo:
This photo below shows two example IBM-sublimated keys on my F122 – note the varying angles and blurriness/thicknesses of the front printing even for IBM:
Some production photos:
Here are some more photos from the keyboard assembly process. Several hundred thousand parts needed to be assembled for the current container shipment currently at sea. As shown in one of the videos on the project’s YouTube channel, the final inner assembly step is for the custom made pneumatic machine to press the bottom inner assembly with PCB onto the other parts.
This photo also shows the more authentic XT style foam being used for the current container shipment, as opposed to the foam used for prior shipments. As the new foam is less dense, I expect it will result in sound quality that is slightly less muffled, but this may not be noticeable. For those who prefer the higher sound dampening properties of the older foam, all of the extra foam is still that style (there is no option to get extras of the XT style foam at this time, besides the foam for the IBM XT keyboard itself which is still available in limited quantities).
Plans for the final round continue:
Now that production and assembly have wrapped up for the early bird round, my expectation is that planning will ramp up for the final round later this year (it has already started and is in progress as we wait for the current container shipment to arrive). While the keyboards will be the same as the current round, without some cost cutting the final round keyboards are expected to cost much higher than the current batch (pricing was fortunately frozen on the current batch before the recent inflation).
Since I’m not willing to cut the cost or quality of the keyboard itself I expect to focus on redesigning the packaging to be more efficient while still protecting the keyboards. The polystyrene IBM style packaging is alas probably going to be gone, replaced by the foam material and design currently used by the compact case keyboards (I am open to packaging suggestions).
This will allow the boxes to be smaller, which will reduce final round cost increases due to container shipping costs (delivering to me) and shipping costs to the customer (due to shipping weight savings of maybe 1-2 pounds-it adds up when shipping thousands of keyboards), which have skyrocketed more than 30% since last year for many international destinations. In the past month or so, international shipping went up $15 for the project. Also to save weight I may have to bring the boxes down to high quality but single walled.
New store item:
As a small update – as part of the current batch of keyboard parts in the container ship I ordered some USB-C braided cables in red and gray – now available in the store. These are only available as additional cables, not as replacement cables for the ones included with the keyboard (the included ones are all black; all cables are 3 meters in length). https://www.modelfkeyboards.com/product/spare-usb-keyboard-cable/
Nice project – 3D printed solenoid holder for the classic style zinc cases:
Here is a high end 3D printed solenoid holder for the F62 zinc case – nice work samcdc6600!
