Today I wanted to talk about my new Preonic V3 from OKLB from Drop. I know by now I have a problem, but I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I can only assume a future apocalypse will be survived by a plethora of keyboards.

Here is the final result, equipped with Kalih Box Black switches. After hand-wiring my last keyboard, putting together this beauty almost feels like cheating. The no-solder sockets make this an easy afternoon project. With that said, I did bend a couple pins the first couple times I was assembling the switches, so it isn’t a fool-proof method. The lesson is don’t go blindly jamming the switches in, assuming they’ll just work. You do need to expend a little effort to get it right. Regarding the box switches, the wobble of other switches has never really bothered me, but I wanted to give the box switches a try. They do have a nice feel to them. I’ve also grown fond of my current layout, so I just copied it into a new QMK profile based on the Preonic V3 firmware. Overall, as expected, it has been an enjoyable keyboard to assemble and use.

Beyond the stock keyboard build there are a couple custom components. The caps they shipped were nice, but I already had in mind a slightly different look.

As a bonus, I’ve included a couple build process images. I ended up with a damaged switch from shipping, luckily I had a spare Speed Silver laying around.