Due to various health concerns, my time is less valuable than one could wish it to be. Within the last year, my family converted part of our garage into a workshop designed to keep me busy during the few hours each day that I am able to be productive. I use it to fool about with single board computers, μcontrollers, and other electronics, to clean and maintain my firearms, to pretend to learn to program, and eventually to print incredibly useful things with my 3D printer. In addition, I have access to my reloading equipment should my health allow its use in the future. I am also in the middle of a large project for my Dad, converting forty-plus years of sermons into digital format. I introduce this series of posts in this way to explain why I am embarking on what to many would not be worth their time, but which to me is a viable option.
During my foray into custom keyboards I discovered that within that world existed an entirely separate world of keycaps and that within that world existed yet another world of what are referred to, somewhat pretentiously, as artisan keycaps. I have changed the keycaps on my board, but I do not have any of these artisan caps at present. It did occur to me, however, that making these caps was a low-impact activity with long periods of downtime during curing, with which I could supplement our family's income. After my initial research, I calculate that I should be able to recoup my initial investment in equipment within twelve to eighteen months, and then begin to make a small profit. It may be that I can cast other small items of interest as well, such as catering to board game geeks with various shaped and colored dice.
This post will serve as the first in a series dedicated to this venture. I will try to cover in detail my progress including my successes and failures, initial costs, and, in time, my procedures. The first steps for me, which are ongoing, are research and acquiring the necessary kit. I will cover research here, and kit choices and costs in the next post.
Let me say that it has not been as easy researching this topic as I had hoped. If you are interested in reloading ammunition or using a 3D printer, Google will quickly oblige with links to specific and detailed instructions. This may be the case if your goal is resin casting in general, or even using resin to cover a bar top or build a river table, but learning the intricacies of resin casting keycaps is a little more involved. I will provide a list of links to the most helpful resources I have found below. In addition, should a future reader be interested in following in my footsteps, I strongly suggest you open your favorite text editor and begin taking notes. I have found that much information is duplicated, and often verbose. I am compiling a document with condensed information that I will be able to reference while I am still learning. I cannot share this document in its present form as I have liberally applied CTRL-C and CTRL-V, and I do not wish to steal someone else's work. Perhaps at some point, I will rewrite this document and share it.
For general casting information, r/ResinCasting is a good resource. There are some keycap makers there that will help answer your questions. Be sure to search first before asking a question! Specifically, the r/ResinCasting Wiki is very helpful.
The two posts found on the blog of Lamella Creations are full of info. I am unsure if the commerce side of the website is defunct or simply not available in the United States, but fortunately, the info is still available.
You need a way to make molds for casting keycaps. There is more than one method available to do this, but the one used most seems to be the ZButt system. In addition to the GitHub page with files for 3D printing your own and a very helpful Wiki, you can purchase them already made from ZappyCappys. While I have an FDM 3D printer, one part of the system should be printed with an SLA printer. Because of this, I chose to order my ZButt parts pre-made. You will find the creator of ZButt on Reddit, GitHub, and various other places on the Interweb. In addition, he has created a Discord server dedicated to ZButt.
YouTube is obviously a big source of information on resin casting in general and resin casting keycaps specifically. The official Alumilite channel has some good information, and I assume the other resin and silicone manufacturers do as well, although I have not made it that far yet. Two series of videos on using the ZButt system are particularly helpful. First, are four videos posted by NG covering his process for making caps while using the first version of ZButt. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of videos on the channel, and all are several years old. The information is still very good and worth watching. Second, there are three videos posted by CosmoCaps covering version 2 of ZButt. In addition, I have shared a Resin Casting playlist which contains the above videos as well as a handful of others. Keep in mind that videos may be removed from this playlist as I work through them if I decide they are not worth the time. Finally, the instructions and data sheets that come with resin and silicone products are important. This is not a "hold my beer" sort of project. RTFM (this acronym is NSFW). If you should have any additional resources for resin casting in general or artisan keycaps in particular, please leave a comment.
As always, I reserve the right to be wrong.