silencing material adding sum heft to my case.

[TuxKey]

Hi guys,

A while back (like a year ago) i went on a quest to find a material to silence my then pinging KUL keyboard..
I wanted a material that was thin, that would stick and worked well for sound isolation and resonance.

After a long search i came across a Dutch company called akoestiekwinkel.nl when contacting them they where sum what surprised about my queries asking me what do you mean a keyboard ??? What kind of keyboard ?? hahahha..
(very folks btw)
Well they might have bin lacking in keyboard knowledge (not surprising) but they sure knew a few things about sound and how to dampen it. So after a few emails and a few phone calls i got my sample pack.

Two samples impressed me "Tecnocell" a thicker foam like material that's ideal for filling up a space..
But the more interesting sample was called "VibraFlex that was the one i used for my FC660C case.

The result was a nicer feeling case it felt a bit heavier more substantial and the hollow sound you hear when you tap the case was dampened by a lot!! you could really tell where i had put sum and where not after assembling the case back together.

it's like dampening your upstroke on a Topre board your hear a nice thick tok instead of thin plastic..
On the plus it's easy to manage cut in to small pieces the sticky side works nicely no mess no fuss.
Also the thickness is amazing for it's performance i measured 1mm thickness well under the pcb stand offs.
This is going to be the material i'm going to use to silence my next computer build ..Well i'l probably first call them and grind them for more tips hahaha..

ps. almost forgot a second use i'm planning to test.. A while back i had the KUL keyboard and they added thin strips of sum kind of dampening material under the enter+shift keys that is where the keycap hits the metal plate..
With my FC660C i don't suffer from that problem but i do have other keyboards that could benefit from this.
I did cut one more strip and put it on the left side but left the right side alone because the controller was going there

Nice strip of VibraFlex

Image-1(1).jpg (1.46 MiB) Viewed 1397 times

Nice strip of VibraFlex

Image-1(1).jpg (1.46 MiB) Viewed 1397 times

[Brett MacK]

Wow that would be useful for the alps build in doing. Where do you buy this stuff?

[Blaise170]

I would imagine that good audio damping material would work in the same way. Back before my first car got wrecked I had a nice car audio setup going, and in order to keep my trunk from rattling so much I put in some sound dampening. I used SoundQubed Q Mat with my SoundQubed speakers and it deadened the rattle a lot. For reference, the video below is my car with audio deadening. You can still hear the rattling a bit at the 0:20 mark but it was probably 3-4 worse than that before the dampening.

You don't have to get SoundQubed, any brand should work, but if you are interested here is the page with a smaller amount, good for probably 5-6 keyboards if I had to guess.

https://soundqubed.com/product/q-mat-speaker-kit/

[zslane]

I just use thin sheets of sorbothane acoustic dampening material. Available from Amazon.