part · board

MM Studio Class80

Spec sheet

Layout: TKL
Case material: Aluminum
Mount style: Gasket
Hotswap: no
Wireless: no
Released: Sep 1, 2022

Retro-styled CNC aluminum TKL from MM Studio with thick bezels, a 3.5 kg unbuilt weight, and a choice of top mount, PCB gasket mount with plate, or plateless PCB gasket. R1 sold out; R2 succeeded it.

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Mentioned in 4 articles

Ideas

Build of the week: the mission control desk, in Class80, Godspeed, and Box White

A retro TKL, a steel-blue-and-cream SA set, and a clicky box-stem switch aren't three separate purchases here — they're one decision, made three times, that only works because each part solves a problem the other two create.

thockSep 6, 20267 min read

Side-section line drawing of a keyboard case with the plate resting on cantilevered metal tabs reaching in from the case walls, drawn in a 2px warm-grey stroke on warm paper; the right-hand tab is deflected downward under a keypress, with a single muted-terracotta splash at the flex point where the tab bends and a small warm-bronze dot in the upper margin.

Deep Dives

Leaf-spring mounts, explained: what a bending metal tab does that a foam strip cannot

The Nyawice's spec line and Mode's plate-tab mounting blocks both lean on one old idea — let a thin tab bend instead of a foam strip squash. The physics is textbook; the keyboard implementations are not, and the name covers more than one mechanism.

thockAug 4, 202610 min read

Line-drawing comparison of five keyboard case silhouettes shrinking left to right — full-size with numpad, tenkeyless, 75%, 65%, and 60% — arranged like a family tree with a bronze accent dot marking the 60% case as the root the other compact sizes branch from.

Deep Dives

How the 60% became the default custom-keyboard layout

Every custom-keyboard buyer's guide since the mid-2010s opens with the same four-term vocabulary — 60%, 65%, 75%, TKL — as though it always existed. It didn't. One open-source PCB out of a geekhack thread is most of the reason that taxonomy exists at all.

thockJul 29, 202611 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.

thockApr 25, 202613 min read

MM Studio Class80 appears in editor-curated build sheets.

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