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Spec sheet
- Layout
- 65
- Case material
- aluminum
- Mount style
- gasket
- Hotswap
- yes
- Wireless
- no
- Released
- Jan 8, 2022
Cast-aluminum 65% with an o-ring gasket mount, FR4 plate, and a hotswap QMK/VIA PCB. CannonKeys' evergreen budget pick at $150; the board most often recommended as a first custom.
Mentioned in 7 articles
Trends
Keychron's Quiet Takeover: How One Brand Became the Mechanical Keyboard Default
Ask almost anyone — a forum regular, a YouTube comment section, a Discord server for people who just bought their first mechanical keyboard — what board to get, and you'll hear the same answer. This is how that happened.
thock9 min read
Ideas
Pairing Oil Kings with the Mode Sonnet
This pairing has been on the bench for months, and a free Sunday finally made it happen. The Sonnet is a soft 65 with a top-mount-leaf gasket, and Oil Kings are a heavy factory-lubed linear — together they hit a register worth coming back to.
thock5 min read
Trends
When customs became vendor-first
From 2018 through 2022 the typical custom shipped through one host vendor and a fan of regional proxies; by 2026 the baseline custom is a configurator on a vendor's own storefront. Boards moved. Keycap group buys mostly didn't.
thock6 min read
Trends
The split/ergo cohort grew up
Split and ergonomic boards spent a decade as a hobbyist sub-cohort orbiting a stagger-majority. By 2026 the Voyager line, the Glove80, and a steady trickle of r/mk transition posts have pushed split/ergo across a visibility threshold — still a minority, but now a reference category instead of a footnote.
thock5 min read
Guides
Mounting styles, compared: gasket, top-mount, tray, and integrated plate
A builder who has lubed switches and tuned stabilizers and chosen a keycap profile and still cannot place why their next board feels different from their last one is usually meeting the mount style. The plate's relationship to the case is the half of the typing feel that nobody discusses on a sound test.
thock12 min read
Trends
How 75 percent became the default custom layout
Two years ago a custom-board recommendation defaulted to 65% with a polite note about 75% as the next step up. The Sonnet 2026 refresh, the QK75, and a crowded mid-tier have flipped that order. 75% is now the layout customs reach for first.
thock5 min read
Ideas
What gasket mount actually delivers (and what it doesn't)
The label appears on keyboards at every price point, from $90 prebuilts to $400 group-buy customs, but two boards with identical spec-sheet language can sound nothing alike. Here is what the term actually tells you, and what it doesn't.
thock9 min read
Bakeneko65 appears in editor-curated build sheets.