Despite the risks, I stuck with the black acrylic paint.  As long as you let it dry fully, it doesn’t eat the plastic key surrounds.  Whew.  My painting of the keytops to blue went better — that paint (enamel) doesn’t ‘corrode’ the plastic and can be flaked off.   My tiny brush did leave some bubbles behind but it’s ok to look at.

The next challenge was the lettering.  Wasn’t sure how Don got his letters on there, although looking at pics on the museum site zoomed in all the way it looked like they were cut from a sheet and then adhered to the key surrounds. Could be dry transfer too (I’ve not touch dry transfers since I was in short pants!)

I decided to try to replicate Don’s work using Avery label stock.  However the fonts were a problem.  They do have services where you can upload a small jpeg of the font you’re trying to find and it’ll do its best to match it.  Unfortunately this particular font was impossible to locate.    In the end, I decided to just ‘lift’ the font from the museum photos, photoshop it and then print it.

The next trick was just figuring out what to print it with.  I wanted to get the correct ‘sheen’ to match the paint on the surrounds, so initially I thought inkjet + glossy label paper.  Nope.  Came out way too bright.  So then I went laser on non-glossy.  Ah.  Not perfect, but looked better.  I printed basically the image above, used an Xacto to cut away the individual letters and then stuck them on.  They look pretty good — the only annoyance was the white edges.  I got rid of that using a fine black marker.  Result:  not bad!

That’s about as far as I can go with the case until I get the boards built.  There are still some unanswered questions I think only having the physical boards will answer.

You read that right.  After a few days of crisis, debating whether to ‘destroy’ a very difficult to replace original Mohawk keyboard, I finally gave in to my replica demons and resolved to paint.  As I stated in the beginning, I wanted the unobtainable.  Although I could have left my keytops alone and had something that had the same general look and feel as Don Lancaster’s TVT prototype, the whole point of the challenge was to see how close I could get.

There are all kinds of risks inherent in painting.  I believe Don spray painted his legends.  Spray painting involves risk — some of the solvents used in these paints can actually damage plastic.  Damaging ultra-hard-to get Mohawk keytops would be devastating.

There’s also the problem of matching colours.  The flat black Don used ought to be relatively straightforward but the blue was another thing altogether.

And then lastly, how to actually paint them?  The square legends and round keytops were a single piece.  Try as I might, I could not separate them.  So that meant I had to somehow paint the top and bottom separately without intruding on either.  And my painting skills are marginal at best.  Yike.

I went to Canadian Tire and found my flat black right away, in the automotive section.  The cap matched almost exactly what I had in pictures.  Perfect.  Blue proved trickier, but by a stroke of luck I found a can of Engine enamel in ‘Ford Blue’.  And darned if it wasn’t almost exactly what I needed!

The first row of keys would be mostly easy.  The first ten keys are completely black.  No masking needed.

My spray painting hands did not betray me.  The black keys were turning out perfect!

The last key in the row was the red Return key.  Fortunately this keyboard came with more than enough red keys for my project, so I’d only have to paint the legends.  To mask off the legends, I tried a few different things like masking tape but couldn’t get it to adhere properly for some reason.  On one spray test, I found the paint was easily able to get underneath and mark the red key top.  Darn!

My next trick was to make a cap out of tin foil and carefully press it around the key.

This more or less did the job with just a tiny bit of overspray creeping up.

While trying to gently remove overspray though I did discover one disturbing thing — the solvents in the black paint actually ate at the plastic keys!  The thing I’d feared most!  If I didn’t touch them they were fine, and after the paint dried I could actually flake a bit of it off.  But if I touched it while still curing, it actually melted and pitted the plastic!  Augh!  I had to put a couple of keytops aside later because in painting the keytops themselves I accidentally hit the now black legends, and while trying to remove the blue ended up removing some of the black and causing pitting to the legends.  Sigh.  Oh well.. no going back now!

Here’s a shot with the whole top row and some of the blue done:

And keytop melting aside — I’m getting kind of excited!  Now I went for the rest!

The first row of blue keys was easy — they were already blue.  The rest of my keys were white, which presented an issue because somehow I had to paint the legends black and then paint the keytops without getting any blue paint on the black.  I spent a day thinking about how to mask off the legends but kept drawing blanks.  No matter how I thought about it, I ended up with a situation where I could get the correct size hole to poke the keytop through, but the masking material would be so thin and flimsy it would still expose the legend to blue paint anyway.  In tests, I also found the blue engine enamel, unlike the black acrylic laquer, didn’t adhere to the plastic very well.  In the end, I decided to try hand painting (yike).  It wasn’t *that* hard, but I did get some bubbling that I couldn’t get rid of.

Kind of exciting.  It’s starting to resemble the original a little bit, at least from a few feet away.  🙂  I have to fix those badly mauled legends on two of the keys, and the bubbling on the blue paint isn’t so hot up close, but, it is a homebrew type thing and plausibly that could have happened to a lesser mortal building something like this back in the heady days of 1973.

Now to figure out the lettering..