I had a brilliant idea, or so I thought, to hand-build a middle layer for the Fourier with some polymer clay. The thing about polymer clay is that it's super cheap and comes in a ton of colours, it's also blendable so you can fully customize the shade. But it just wasn't meant to be.
Once the clay was soft enough to mold, it was pretty easy to build on to the bottom layer of the keyboard plate, but then I was left with a dilemma of how to bake the clay. I tried removing the clay from the plate but this left it distorted and with fingerprints. I was also trying to line up the top and bottom plates to ensure the middle layer was a perfect fit, and it kept getting into the pcb/switches which was making it hard to remove. So after a few attempts at making guards/molds/templates with no success I gave up.
I still think it's not a bad idea for anyone wishing to give it a go.
Then there was the aftermath. I had to use a cotton bud and some alcohol to clean up the residue from the switches and plates, which was fine, when I noticed some fine scratches on the base plate of the keyboard. I had used a knife to gently trim/shape the clay in one of my attempts and accidentially scratched the plate. No big deal, right?
Wrong!
Some time had passed after this when I noticed some behavioural issues with the keyboard. As it turns out, the fine scratches were just enough to expose the conductive layer of the base plate, which was making just enough contact with the pro micro to cause a short.
Thankfully, the microcontroller survived with no damage and I was able to fix the issue with some electrical tape. Problem solved!
And even better, while I was using some post-it notes to test the space between the microcontroller and the board, I realized, they were the same colour as the keycaps. What luck!
So, even though I don't have a super ballin' hand-built middle layer to match the exact shaed of my orange keycaps, I was able to wrap the brass standoffs in orange to up the aesthetic a notch or two.
And that's a wrap!