[ianthehenry]

Oh I love this! Doubling as a carrying case is a great idea. I like the flat-pack assembly with the spacers parts. What's the weight of the full assembly like?

I did something similar to this last year, but without the travel goal (just trying to get myself to move around and work outside more). Instead of mating the keyboard to the base, I attached some larger magnets to the bottom of the keyboard by setting them into a custom aluminum bottom plate (also from SendCutSend) and made a flat desk surface out of ferromagnetic steel.

https://ianthehenry.com/posts/kyria-build/bespoker-aluminum-...

One advantage of this is that I can move around the keyboard halves freely, angling them differently throughout the day. Which is also sort of a disadvantage, but they stick pretty well in place if I'm not trying to mess with them. I can also attach some other things that I slapped magnets on (mostly a mechanical pomodoro timer that I use for writing).

https://i.imgur.com/S0bstNs.png

I experimented with some alternate keyboard mounting strategies, but didn't find anything that made a big difference.

https://i.imgur.com/ohNWhhS.png

This is my second magnetic keyboard lap desk prototype. My first was far too heavy, so to reduce weight I just bent a piece of sheet steel around a piece of cork (the sharp bends add a lot of rigidity). I think the next one will be tented a bit... SendCutSend does bending now; I bet I could laminate steel to a thin aluminum frame...

[guidoism]

Oh cool! I've been working on something similar. I am trying to move to a more ergo keyboard from a straight ortho and wanting to build something that fits on top of my laptop when I'm in bed, etc. So I had some "core" 6x3 boards build and glued magnets on the bottom:

https://imgur.com/a/FNn32o4

I'm now waiting on my thumb cluster PCBs from china as well as my corne-style column stagger cores. I've also moved from raw header pins to JST SH 4 and 6 pin connectors to connect the raw row and column signals to a central board.

The intent is to play around with angle, position, splay, etc until I find something I like. The magnetic parts make it a lot easier (and cheaper!) to make changes.

I bought an inexpensive 12"x12" magnetic steel bulletin board from Amazon for the base.

[trishume]

Oooh nice! Your Kyria posts are actually where I first learned about how awesome and cheap SendCutSend is, and got some of the inspiration for the magnets.

I actually ordered a plain steel plate first, but I realized that given that I needed them in a different position to travel compactly than the wide position I like for typing, I wanted them to snap in consistent positions so it wasn't finicky to line up exactly how I liked them.

[guidoism]

What ball joint mounts are you using? They aren’t the standard 1” balls right?

[guidoism]

Is that leather on top of the plate? I bought a piece of leather to try that out for mine too.

[ianthehenry]

Yep! Got a piece of tooling leather, roughed up the steel with sandpaper, and affixed it with gorilla glue two part epoxy. If you go that route, make sure you clean the steel with soap -- my first attempt started to delaminate after a few months, I think because I didn't do that. After the epoxy cured I cut it to size and burnished the edges with a cheap wooden burnisher and some beeswax.

I used a piece of undyed vegetable-tanned leather that I treated with neatsfoot oil and left in the sun for a few days. The oil takes it from pale pink to an ugly, mottled liver color, but as it rests in the sun it develops that warm, rich tan. (This is sort of off-topic but that board was my first time "finishing" leather myself, and I like the look and feel of it so much that I've done it for all my leather projects since.)