65 percent kit, 68 switches, through hole diodes already populated thankfully. Six hours across two evenings, and nothing went wrong at all. It works, it looks fine, no bridges. But I kept stopping to re read instructions and inspect joints, and I watched a build video afterwards where the guy did the whole thing in about forty minutes. I want to know whether I am slow or whether the video is the outlier.
Your pace is fine, but check your technique is not the reason for it. Tip at 320 to 340 degrees, tin the tip, touch the pad and the pin together for about a second, feed solder for another second, remove solder then remove iron. A good joint looks like a small shiny cone. If you are sitting on each pin for five seconds waiting for something to happen, your iron is too cold or the tip is oxidised, and that alone can double the time.
Also clean the tip on a brass wool ball rather than a wet sponge. The sponge cools the tip every time and makes everything slower.
The one thing that genuinely matters is that you tested the PCB before committing. Everything else is speed, and speed is worth nothing on a board you build once every two years.
Six hours and zero mistakes is a better outcome than forty minutes and three cold joints, which is what a rushed first build actually produces.
@blown_cap · 2w ago · 3 replies
Four to eight hours is completely normal for a first build. The videos are people who have done thirty of them, with the parts already sorted, editing out the boring parts.
Where your time actually went, roughly: switch soldering is 136 joints and at a genuinely careful pace that is an hour and a half. Stabilisers, if you tuned them, is another hour on a first attempt. Testing and inspecting is where beginners spend the rest, and that is time well spent.
An order that saves an hour next time. Test the PCB with tweezers before soldering anything. Do the stabilisers completely, and test them by hand, before any switch goes in, because reaching a stab under installed switches is miserable. Put in the four corner switches, snap the plate on, check it is square, then solder those four, then the rest. Flash the firmware before you install every keycap.
Second build will be two hours. Third will be ninety minutes and you will stop counting.
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@leech_wrangler · 3w ago
Tweezer testing the PCB before soldering had not occurred to me at all. Adding all of this to a note for the next one.
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@secondhandamps · 3w ago
Doing stabs first is the biggest single time saver on the list. I ignored that advice once and spent forty minutes with tweezers and a lot of swearing.
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