Keyboard Carry Cover

I move between my apartment near university and my parents’ home often. One of the few things that I always bring with me back and forth is my compact mechanical keyboard. Usually I just wrap a shirt or jacket over the keyboard and throw it in my backpack, but I need something a little fancier. I found a nice piece of hard maple in my garage the perfect size and decided to make it into my new keyboard carry cover.

After taking a few measurements of my keyboard and creating a simple cad model in just a few minutes, I started on the cnc toolpaths that would bring my keyboard cover to life.

Off to the cnc router, I secured the maple blank with a couple countersunk screws and ran the job. It’s always fun to see the cnc router aggressively attack wood. (yes, I know the wrong endmill is attached.)

A couple rough edges were left near the ends of the grain by the cnc router, but it wasn’t too much to remove for some sand paper. The pocketing passes took some time.

Next is my unique take on the humble keyboard cover and that is to add some elastic band to secure it to the keyboard and secure accessories. One inch black elastic band contrasts with the light color of the hard maple. My first idea was to glue the bands to the back through the holes, but I decided sewing the straps together would be more durable.

The underside of the keyboard carry cover with the elastic straps attached. Simple design to get the job done.

Accessories such as cables or connectors can be held down with the extra elastic straps on the top. I’m not too worried about not covering the bottom of the keyboard because it’s made of thick powder-coated aluminum plates, but it is nice knowing that the more fragile switches and keycaps are safe inside my backpack when traveling. Overall this project was a good brush up of cad and cam skills.

Skills Enhanced

• CAD (PTC Creo Parametric)
• CAM (Fusion 360)