discrete buckling spring barrel + single unit PCB idea

[andrea-i]

Hi all! As I was daydreaming on making my own buckling springs custom keyboard, iterating in my head where to source barrels, flippers, etc, I thought of something that might be feasible, or not, reason why I wanted to open this thread and get other opinions.

The idea would be to 3d print a new custom barrel, pretty much the same as the original but with two pins sticking from the bottom.
A single unit PCB would need to be made with two holes corresponding to the pins in the barrel.
Two copper traces again with two holes so that they can be soldered to two wires to close the contact.
The sandwich plates with custom layouts could be cut just as we get custom plates for MX switches.
The annoying thing would be sourcing the flippers I guess, although it looks like 3d printing capacitive material is totally doable, which would leave us with just finding the springs.

discreteBarrel.jpg (220.74 KiB) Viewed 919 times

The bottom layer should be isolated to never get in touch with the wires sticking out of the little pcbs, but that's easily done with a layer of whatever, even just tape.

The sound and feel might even be similar to that of a model F.

For as much as I'm dying to get my hands on one of Ellipse's new model Fs, I kinda miss the do-it-yourself part in the buckling spring world, and I think there might be untapped potential.
Thoughts?

[fohat]

These are the problems that have plagued all the "revival" projects. Last year's M/F project vacuumed up large numbers of parts that dozens of us are (im)patiently waiting for to complete our builds.

Modern reproductions look good but get pricey when approximately 100 are needed per keyboard.