Kelp
6063 aluminum, machined, bead-blasted, then type II anodized. We mix one dye. In a flat light the case reads nearly black; on the chamfer, where the light rakes across the grain of the blast, it goes olive. The edge is the color.
No. 01 · A writing board
Hear the
brass.
A gasket-mounted 75% with 850 grams of brass in the bottom of the case. Everything above the weight is there to let that mass finish the note.
Scroll
Keel Workshop
Sheet 01 — The 75
82 keys · gasket · 1 : 1
Providence
The 75, specified.
Numbers for the people who already own a board. The spring is quoted the way a spring maker quotes it: actuation, then the floor.
South-facing, so a Cherry-profile cap clears the housing. Wired, because a battery in this case would be a second instrument, and a worse one. Eight thousand reports a second is the only figure here that isn’t about the sound. The cursor is part of the sentence.
What it’s cut from.
Four materials, and none of them is a finish for its own sake. Each one is in the stack because of what it does to a four-millimeter fall.
Brass
C360 in the keel, and the same family in the 1.5 mm plate, so the two age together. The weight is brushed along its length and screwed to the aluminum, metal to metal. The plate is left a shade brighter and set on poron, so it can still give under a hard key.
PBT
Doubleshot, Cherry profile, dye-free legends. The letter is a second piece of plastic shot through the cap, which is why it will outlast the anodize. The dish is cylindrical — curved left to right, straight front to back — so a fingertip centers itself and doesn’t get held there.
Poron
One sheet, 3.8 mm, full coverage, between the board and the shell. No window cut for the weight. A window is a place for a case to ring, and the ring is the thing this board is built not to do.
A note with a short life.
Most aluminum boards ring, and the ring gets called “the sound” by people who haven’t put any mass in the bottom. A Keel keystroke is a tap, then nothing. Type anywhere on this page.
Where the energy goes
The drawing above is the shape we design for, not a microphone trace. The long gray tail is the ring the weight is there to kill.
- CapPBT, short and dry. The strike.
- Leaf, then poleThe contact at two millimeters. The floor at four. That second meeting is the tap.
- PlateBrass takes it and doesn’t sing back.
- GasketThe break. The aluminum shell never gets a turn.
- FoamWhat’s left goes into the poron.
- KeelThe rest of it ends in the brass.
Reserve · Providence
$440
Assembled, lubed, tuned. Four weeks from the day the cases are cut. The price doesn’t move when you change the spring.
Spring · bottom-out
Legend
Kelp case · 48 g · Ink
The case is Kelp. We anodize one color, because we only want to answer for one.