How is SF60 Aluminium Keycap Made
At our factory, every standard MCAP with the SF60 must go through over a dozen manufacturing stages — pressure casting, degating, polishing, laser engraving, painting, manual enamel filling, baking, stem bonding, and QC. The complex process makes every step difficult.worth it when the keycaps are this beautiful.
This is not an assembly line. It is an endless battle against 0.1mm deviations, color mismatch, air bubbles,burrs.
Step 1: Pressure Casting – From Molten Aluminium to a Blank
The life of a keycap begins with aluminum, melted at high heat and injected into a mold. later,reveal a row of raw alu keycaps still attached to the “gate” — they look like a cluster of metal grapes.
The First challenge: degating. Workers must use specialized tools to cut each keycap cleanly from the head. If the cut is crooked, the keycap won’t install on the keyboard correctly. If the cut is too deep, the structural integrity of the keycap is compromised.
Step 2: Polishing – Making Every Surface“Mirror‑Smooth”
After cutting, the keycaps have "burrs"—rough metal edges left over from step1. They must undergo three stages of processing to get smooth—rough grinding, precision grinding, and polishing.To ensure the top surface, four sides, and inner walls all reach the expected level of smoothness.
The Second challenge: Unevenness on aluminium surface cannot be accurately detected by the naked eye alone. Quality workers use their fingers to touch the surface and examine it under a light; any defective keycaps will be drapped.
An experienced worker once joked, “Smoothing a keycap is harder than smoothing a face.”
Step 3: Laser engraving—The most important step.
At first, laser engraving was used to ablate grooves into the aluminium rough keycaps. However, it's difficult to control the depth and edge.It often leads to uneven edges and character distortion.This caused in a high reject rate. Therefore we're continuously working on improvements and constantly testing new molds to adapt it.
Step 4: Painting – Dressing the Metal in Color
For the color of SF60,the keycaps are designed in 4 colors,black, silver, pink, and blue.
The Third challenge:
Color mismatch: Keycaps from different batches come out with slightly different shades. Therefore, our QC process requires a amount of time.
Bumps: Dust particles in the air land on the wet painting,they become permanent bumps.
Orange peel: If the paint doesn’t level properly, the surface ends up looking like the skin of an orange.
Step 5: machine&Manual Enamel Filling color – The most complicated part of making SF60 metal keycaps.
Using a fine needle or a paintbrush, workers fill the engraved legend grooves with enamel (similar to nail polish but thicker)and scrape it flat.We must operate under a pair of magnifying glasses.Every time shakes, it will ruin a keycap.
An experienced worker can fill at most 300 keycaps per day. Moreover, after filling color, the keycaps must be pre‑baked for 1 hour before the next color— It will spend time if a keycap has multiple colors(like CAPS,CTRL,SHIFT and Space bar).
Step 6: Baking & Color Fixing
After filling the color, the keycaps go into an oven and are baked at a controlled temperature to fix the color. Once they come out, works use 10x magnifiers to check each keycap one by one: "Font clarity", "Color saturation", and "Edge Sharpness"
Abandoned Rate: There are 25% keycaps are sent back for rework or abandoned.
Step 7: Stem Bonding – Making the Keycap Stand Up
The stem of a metal keycap doesn't precess casting together with the keycap body (that would never get sufficient precision). Instead, the stem is injection-molded separately and then glued to the inner wall.
Step 8: Final QC
Every finished keycap must go through:
Visual inspection: Color mismatch, surface bumps, scratches, color fill defects.
Dimensional sampling: Caliper measurements of height, width, and wall thickness.
From press casting to warehousing,due to the unprecedented complexity crafting of keycap, we are currently able to produce fewer than 100 sets per day.It caused limited production for the SF60, and we are go for adjusting the production process.
— Cilkey SF60 Metal Keycap Craftsmanship record
Later, we’ll talk about the design of the SF60 – why it’s called "Super Force", and how the CNC machine “understood” Ferrari’s design language.
https://discord.gg/qfksTTACYt