in today's episode of Linus tech tips home isolation edition
we are going to take these plain old boring keyboard keycaps and infuse dye
into the surface of them to make our very own full color custom keycaps all
you need to do this is a converted inkjet printer
a homemade heat press some sublimation paper in my hand
and a little bit of patience this is going to be my first time doing it so
let's hope that colin's instructions are extremely clear
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in this video
dye sublimation is the process of printing a dye onto a transfer medium
then with the application of both heat and pressure infusing the dye into the
surface of a receptive material this process is commonly used to print onto
mugs clothing phone cases and much much more and with a little bit of work you
can take an everyday inkjet printer and
some dye sublimation transfer paper oh apparently i already have that one
how convenient note that if you choose to convert a second hand printer guys
there are some extra steps involved we went new and we chose the epson
wf-7210 because it's relatively cheap
and there were ample choices for dye sub conversion kits on amazon time to set it
up i guess i have no instructions for this so
good luck the most important thing though is to not run the stock
cartridges at any point because then it's a used printer and now you have to
do those extra steps this looks and feels extremely cheap
refill ink hole is this
this is so stupid these don't even have screw on tops this just like
rams on there that's not amazing wait oh shoot that's
not the oh that's the air hole oh shoot i have one job i have one job put the
thing into the correct hole see you knew i wasn't gonna be able to handle that
all right hey one down
i think it's the size because normally the black ones are bigger but i don't
think it actually lets you fill it all the way okay
you got us a printer ladies and gentlemen probably like that i guess would i screw
up something as simple as loading paper in a printer
well would i screw up something as big as marrying someone who doesn't know how
to put paper in a printer no now that that's over with we can get to
printing so i've actually got a sheet of designs from our very own one and only
macro king taryn van heemert apparently
this is just one of the uh
many that taryn has requested so there's going to be a lot of
trial and error here i guess it doesn't really matter which design we uh start
with why does he need a band key like bandhan
i don't know so while that's printing guys um you can take a break and visit
lttstore.com oh who's a hater now
all right let's have a look at our size here so these are supposed to be 11
millimeter by 11 millimeter which should fit
pretty nicely onto our keys we didn't go right to the edge
we left a bit of a border but that was on purpose now that that's
done i will finally go through the press that colin made so the construction is
pretty simple you've got two pieces of wood
small hinge a heater element right here
and then a power supply for the aforementioned heater element
we also used some high temp jb weld to hold the heater in place and
basically all that's involved is you take this puppy
put it this way and then apply pressure
when you've got both heat and pressure the ink should soak
into the key cap permanently collins instructions were doing pretty well
until now i'm supposed to remove this silicone from this plastic strip but
they seem to have bonded fairly permanently nope this is not coming off fine i guess
you're getting the axe today this was the only other silicone thing that i
could find in this building unfortunately now we
just need a piece of this that is about the same size
as our keycap printout the silicone goes
on there apply pressure for 50 to 60 seconds geez
that is a long time okay here we go
all right let's have a look we got nothing
let's try that again absolutely nothing i have an uneasy
suspicion that this ink is not dye sublimation ink at all because i would
have expected it to transfer at least a little bit so far as you guys can
probably tell from the improvements to the lighting
skill with the camera and beard some time has passed and i am
ready to pick up again with diy custom
keycaps this time with the correct ink you want
the minecraft head or you want the minecraft block
so we need to take our creeper and we're going to put it on top of
there that's a play down yes so that's the whole point the ink on
the top is going to get soaked into this plastic
right here so it needs to be upside down can you count to 60 one two
three
sixty that is pretty cool
all right so there's our minecraft creeper i don't know if it needs to cool
down to be durable but
it seems fine right off the bat the idea is that the ink actually soaks right
into the plastic so it shouldn't be easy to remove daddy can
you stop this stop what stop rubbing
stop rubbing it why i'm trying to test and see if it's going to come off it's
not coming off impressively the color is
actually better after you sublimate it so you can see our white key cap is a
much more vibrant green than our white piece of paper here okay
let's do the little cute face wow that's really good cutting one two
nine sixty okay do you think it worked
yeah oh that's adorable
just like the creeper the die is sublimated into the keycap material so
it does not scratch off that is super cool i've only done about half a dozen
of them so far but i've already learned quite a few things
number one is that more pressure seems
to mean that you can get away with less time
number two is that dye sublimation definitely doesn't work on dark keycaps
at all not only did the images not transfer particularly well but we
actually found that they melted more easily from the heating element
and then the other one is that if you don't get a full transfer you can
actually kind of peel it back a little bit put it back on and then give it
another go that was how we fixed the LTT logo one
if i were to design this uh heat press again one thing i would probably change
is to elevate the hinge a little bit because right now what i'm finding is
compared to just doing 40 seconds which is what i've settled on now with more
pressure i kind of have to do 20 seconds one side
20 seconds the other side in order to get an even application now that i've
got the hang of it though they are coming out incredibly well as long as
it's a pretty simple design on a light-colored cap i don't want to take
another crack at this batman one you can clearly see i didn't put enough pressure
on it let's check this minecraft block shall we hey
how's that look pretty good hey
do you guys want to take another crack at the batman key yeah please well we
can do that together but i think i'm done talking to the
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our recent video where we showed off the
only all metal keyboard as far as we're aware that's right all metal body all
metal keycaps even we're gonna have that linked down below