 Two years ago, we brought to the world's ugliest keyboard. Then, a year later, we built our own keyboard from scratch. How could we up our keyboard game any further? By building the most expensive keyboard we possibly could. Completely out of metal. ["Skyward Theme Song"] ["Skyward Theme Song"] What we're doing today is quite similar to our last keyboard build, except for one key difference. As far as we can tell, no one has ever built an all-metal keyboard. So, where do you even begin with something like that? All-metal parts, of course. Starting with a base to build upon. And that's where our pals at Dixie Mech come in. They sent over one of the first prototypes of their new Bauer keyboard chassis with a custom battle-stressed Cerakote paint job. This thing is CNC machined from 6063 aluminum, so it's like......freaking heavy. It sports a 65% layout and is absolutely sextastic, other than one small omission. The Windows key! What gives? Ah, those are for boomers. Anyway, in Dixie's words, the Windows key is your worst enemy, and while I personally don't agree, I'm certainly willing to give this thing a shot. Now, they're mostly known for their gorgeous keycap sets and accessories, so we're gonna see how their first 4A into keyboard design holds up. And with a retail price of $460 US dollars, I sincerely hope that it is absolutely amazing. Crazily enough, though, this is not even the most expensive part of this build. It's about time we address these. This right here is a full set of completely custom billet brass keycaps made by Salvin. Each of these keycaps starts as a solid chunk of brass that gets machined, abrasive blasted, and finally Cerakoted to prevent oxidation. This is truly peak keyboard bling here, guys. The only way that you could take it a step further is to make them out of frickin' gold or something. Literally, days of machine time was needed to make 66 of these caps. And they're not just gold-like in color, but in mass as well. These things are frickin' heavy! Your run-of-the-mill spacebar, where'd my spacebar go? It's gonna weigh about 8 grams. This one? 40 grams! So the sheer mass of these caps was actually a major consideration in our decision-making process when we were trying to figure out what key switches to use. We tested switches from Cherry, Gateron, and Kiwa extensively, and finally decided on, here we go, these Gateron blacks here. Their higher actuation force helps to balance out our heavy caps, and their linear travel is silky smooth. But not smooth enough. I mean, this is supposed to be an exercise in overkill, is it not, ladies and gentlemen? So we, and of course I mean Colin, went ahead and purchased two different lubricants from Apex Keyboards, and painstakingly opened up and lubed every single switch and stabilizer to make them even smoother and more quiet. If you guys want to see some more switch testing, by the way, definitely get subscribed, because we have a completely blind switch test video coming up that you won't want to miss. For now though, check this out. Here's an un-lubed one. Here's the lubed one. Okay, they don't sound that different, whatever. The point is it feels smoother. So with the addition of, where'd they go? Ah yes, these Cherry screw-in stabilizers, the gang's all here. So all that's left is to assemble the board. Let's fire up the soldering iron and get to work, shall we? Not a bad soldering job actually. That's pretty, pretty consistent. Now that we've got it open, you can see the type C port on the inside of the Bauer case here. So now all that's left is final assembly. So we're going to put our mid-plate onto the base, and I believe the screws are right here. Then we're going to put the top plate over and put on all of our hefty keycaps. Okay, so let's get this all screwed together now. Oh, you're going to do it. Just stand here and look pretty then. Actually, I'm going to take this opportunity to show you guys all the pretty options that we have for accent keys like the escape key. So Salvin actually made up a few different ones for us. There's a Dixie keycap. Man, these things are heavy. And there's an LTT one. Look how good this looks. What's the printing process he's using on this? Is this a silkscreen or what? No, they're laser etched. Oh! Yeah, so they're seracoded. Oh yeah, you can feel it. Yeah, they had a color made for us. That is incredible. How much is each keycap? Each keycap's like, yeah, $50-ish. You weren't kidding when you said that the kit wasn't the most expensive part of this. It really isn't. It's like, like two grand-ish worth of keys. I have to start with the LTT key. Yeah. So here's something to bear in mind, guys. The actuation force of these keys is 50 grams. And for most of them, we don't expect that to be a huge problem, like your typical, your escape, your W, your ASD, all that good important stuff. Spacebar, we're a little worried about. I mentioned this before, but this is a 40-gram key, meaning that this could end up being like basically a hair trigger, like 10-gram force. Can I try this out before we finish it all off? Yeah. I got to try this. All right, so if I'm liking my W, ASD... Oh! There's nothing there. You barely have to touch it. Check this out, check this out. Watch this, you guys should be able to tell. It can barely lift itself back up. Like the response force is so little. Oh, that poor spacebar. Has he ever made a spacebar before? Oh, I'm sure he has, but there just has to be a little more forethought, I think. We can probably find some springs to chuck in the stabilizers or respring the switch. I don't know at this point, but we're just going to make it happen. You know what? We can adjust. The other ones, though. Yeah, the other ones are great. That's got a nice sound to it. OK, let's slam these keys on. Yeah, all right. I mean, given that they're not labeled, it doesn't really matter what order they go on. But something to bear in mind is that they're actually different heights. So getting them at least in the right row is very, very important because the keyboard itself is angled a bit. But a lot of the angling that gives you that comfortable typing posture comes actually from the heights of the keys themselves. The tolerances on these things are... It's actually because of how he fixtures it. So if you look inside the key, you'll see there's threads and then it gets slotted. Or I don't know if it's slotted beforehand, but it gets screwed down to a fixture and held. And that's how he machines it. Right. Yeah, so these are... So it just means they grab onto the stems like that. Yeah, there's a little bit of a separation. So these are Cherry Row 2. So Cherry Row 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Like, I'm not even the biggest keyboard nerd by any stretch. Is Luke here today? We should show him. I mean, we'd have to clean it after. We could just put it in the oven. You mean the dishwasher? Yeah, I don't know. The oven? Yeah, like when they sterilize things in the oven. Oh, I see. Sterilization? Uh, nope. There's a word for it. I don't know if Luke would be into that. No. I mean, he doesn't want kids, so... I mean, that's more your thing. Eee, got him. Oh, it's starting to come together. This gets me excited. Now, one thing that's interesting is again, probably because of those serrations, they're actually kind of hard to push on. I thought we might have screwed this one up and put the wrong row on, but no, you just really got to give it to them to put them on. And I mean, for the record, the keys do work. There's another C4, and I need one more C3. Am I out? Nope, I got it. Boom. How much does this thing weigh? Like, you could kill a man with this. Okay, Linus, you want to give it away? Really? Not, I'll give it away. I was going to say, I thought we had to send the keycaps back. No, no, the keycaps are going back. I mean, literally weigh it. Okay, hold on. We have to guess first. Do we need to like write it down? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got to write it down. You got a Sharpie. All right. What'd you say? 3100 grams. 3100 grams? I said two kilos. Okay. All right. So that one's just shy of a kilo. Yep. But that's a full 104 key. And this is- But it's plastic. Well, this one's got a metal plate here. It's thin. It's basically a veneer. And then this is what, a 65%? Oh my goodness, I'm way off. I think- You know what? I'm standing by it. Oh. We both went over. Way over. It's got to be just the density. Because it feels. Like picking it up. Like hold these two and tell me that doesn't feel like three times the weight. No, it's the density. It feels harder. It's like rigid, right? Like this, I mean, it's- This is okay keyboard or whatever. It's an okay keyboard. Don't get me wrong. But like this is like, oomph. Have you tried typing? Oh, no. This is the first time it's been fully assembled. Is it? Okay, cool. Do you want to like a typing test? Yeah, sure. Hit me. Hit me with that. And time. 99 words per minute. Okay, right off the bat, what do you think? I'm not a huge fan of the textured home row. I was actually having kind of a hard time finding my way back to it. So I would definitely do a different style of home row. The space bar actually didn't bother me as much as I thought. I did find the slightly rougher texture of the keys was a little harder to glide across. I might do like more slightly more rounded corners actually. Yeah. Yeah. You can put a nice like fill it around the edge. I have never liked a linear keyswitch keyboard this much. It took like three hours. It's like typing on a cloud. I really like the switches. I spent a lot of time trying to decide what switches I wanted to run. And the blacks were not only suggested in the testing with those keyswitch testers. Did you put O-rings on it or is it just a soft landing as part of the nature of that switch? Just like properly lubricated. Look at the sound. It's clacky but not annoying. Yeah. It's still better than blues. Oh, wave it. Well, yeah, it's not obnoxious at all. And I thought the keys would be really cold, but they've warmed up. Oh, yeah. No, it's surprisingly not. Because the thing too is that like the heat sensation in the very tips of your fingers where you've got calluses, it's not as much. Like if I put the inside of my wrist, it's cold. Yeah. But if I put my fingertips on it, it's fine. No big deal. Not that I'm saying not that I'm trying to convince you guys to run out and buy one of these all metal edition keyboards. So the total bill for this would be somewhere in the neighborhood of around 2500 to 3000 US dollars. Yeah, around there. Probably closer to 2500. This is it, guys. This is Peak Keyboard. I'm glad to have experienced it, but I understand why I have to send the parts back because I think no man is truly worthy to own such a keyboard as this one. We are not worthy. Also down below, we're going to have a link to one of our other fun keyboard videos. Why don't we do the DIY keyboard one? Yeah. Throw that down there. Guys, go check that out. And as always, subscribe if you want to see more great content here at Linus Tech Tips. It's like I can't fucking hold one. Should get you some nails so we can like pound them into two by fours. Oh, I don't think Dixie would like that. No.