Cairn 75  ·  Gasket-mount 75%  ·  Machined in Sheffield

Nine layers.
One sound.

A 75% keyboard machined from a single 6063 billet and tuned one layer at a time. Nothing lights up. Everything is heard.

Reserve $389Scroll to take it apart
Type on your keyboard
01  Drawing

Every millimetre is load-bearing.

320 by 134 by 18 at the front, on a six-degree wedge. There is nothing on the outside that isn't holding something on the inside.

02  Open

The top is a frame, not a lid.

It carries no load. The plate hangs on gasket strips between the two halves, so what you type into never reaches the aluminium directly.

03  Lift

Eighty-two switches. Four stabilisers. One plate.

The plate is 1.5 mm FR4. It flexes where aluminium rings, and it gives back the energy at a pitch you want to hear.

04  Stack

The order matters more than the parts.

Foam, board, foam, aluminium, brass. Each layer is chosen for what it does to the layer above it. Change the order and you change the sound.

05  Switch

Fifty-five grams. Two millimetres down. Four to the floor.

The leaf closes at two. The spring sends the stem back faster than your finger left it, which is why fast typing feels like the board is helping.

06  Home

Back together, nothing moved.

Every layer sits where it sat. That is the whole product: a stack that stays put under two thousand words an hour.

Top case6063 aluminium

Anodised, with a two-millimetre chamfer that takes the light so the rest of the case doesn't have to. It touches the plate only through foam.

KeycapsDoubleshot PBT

Cherry profile, 1.5 mm walls. Thick walls sit lower in pitch, and the legends are a second shot of plastic, so they cannot wear.

SwitchesCairn Linear, 55 g

Factory-lubed, long-pole stem. The lubricant isn't for speed; it removes the scratch before you can hear it.

StabilisersScrew-in, clipped, lubed

The four long keys are the ones you hit hardest and hear most. These are tuned so a spacebar sounds like a key, not a hinge.

Plate1.5 mm FR4

Fibreglass gives under the finger and comes back without ringing. Aluminium would be stiffer, and higher, and worse.

Plate foam3.5 mm Poron

Sits between plate and board and fills the cavity where hollowness lives. Most of what people call "thock" is the absence of this air.

PCB1.2 mm, hot-swap, 8,000 Hz

Flex cuts between rows let the board move with the plate instead of fighting it. Polled eight thousand times a second, wired.

Case foamWedge-cut Poron

Fills the tub completely, front to back, so there's no chamber under the board for a keystroke to echo in.

Bottom case6063, one billet

The six-degree angle is machined into the tub, not added with feet. Thicker at the rear, where your hands rest least and the mass helps most.

Weight340 g brass, PVD

Mass under your hands lowers the pitch of everything above it and stops the board walking on the desk. Engraved with its number.

HousingNylon over PC

Nylon bottom for a deeper note. Polycarbonate top, so the stem rides on a harder rail.

StemPOM, long-pole

Bottoms out on the pole, not the housing walls. A cleaner, earlier stop.

SpringStainless, 55 g

Two-stage. Light at the top, firm at the bottom. The return is faster than the press.

Contact leafPhosphor bronze

Closes at 2.0 mm. This is the only part of the keyboard that talks to the computer.

320 mm
134 mm
19.05 mm pitch
0
2.0 actuate
4.0 bottom
Travel, mm
Specification

What it is, exactly.

We publish the numbers because the numbers are the product. If a figure here changes, the sound changes, and you should know.

Wired, on purpose.

Eight-thousand-hertz polling needs a cable, and a keyboard that weighs two kilograms was never going in a bag. So there is no battery to age, no radio to drop, and no compromise in the board's floor to make room for either.

USB-C, detachable, braided, and the one you'd have bought anyway.

Layout75%, 82 keys and a rotary encoderANSI. Exploded arrow cluster, 0.25 u gap under the function row.
SwitchesCairn Linear55 g actuation · 62 g bottom-out · 2.0 / 4.0 mmOr Cairn Tactile, 62 g, 0.4 mm pre-travel bump.
MountGasketPlate suspended on eight Poron strips. No screws touch the plate.
Case6063 aluminium, two-piece, CNC-machined from billetType III anodise (Basalt) or PVD (Slate). Six-degree typing angle machined in.
WeightBrass, PVD-coated, 340 gTotal assembled mass 2.1 kg.
PlateFR4, 1.5 mmHalf-cut flex slots between rows.
KeycapsCherry profile, doubleshot PBT1.5 mm walls. Bone or Ash, with oxblood accents.
ConnectivityUSB-C, wiredDetachable cable included. No wireless.
Polling rate8,000 Hz0.125 ms scan interval. N-key rollover.
Dimensions320 × 134 × 18 mmFront height, case only. 31 mm at the rear.
Materials & finishing

Three materials, chosen for what they do to sound.

Every surface you touch was picked by ear first and by eye second. It happens that the things that sound right also look right, which is not a coincidence: both come from density.

Live · corner, knob and chamfer
Case

6063, Type III anodised

Hard-anodised to 40 microns, then bead-blasted before the dye so the surface scatters light instead of reflecting it. The chamfer is left polished, one line of light around the whole board.

Weight & knob

Brass, PVD

Physical vapour deposition, not lacquer. It doesn't tarnish, it doesn't chip, and it takes the engraving cleanly. Every weight carries its own serial.

Keycaps

Doubleshot PBT, Bone

PBT is harder, denser and duller than ABS. It will never shine. The legends are moulded, not printed, in a second shot of oxblood or graphite plastic.

01 · MachineBoth halves come out of one 6063 billet on a five-axis mill, 3 hours 40 minutes per case. Tolerances are held to 0.02 mm at the gasket lands.
02 · Blast & anodiseGlass-bead blast at 80 psi, then a 40-micron Type III anodise. The chamfer is masked and re-polished after.
03 · TuneEvery plate is flexed by hand before assembly. Stabilisers are clipped, lubed and tested on a tapper before they meet a spacebar.
04 · AssembleBuilt and typed on in Sheffield. The last thing we do is listen to it. If it rings, it goes back.
Sound

Most keyboards sound like the room. This one sounds like the keyboard.

A keystroke lasts about forty milliseconds. What you hear after that is the case finding an excuse to keep going. We took the excuse away.

Cairn 75Typical aluminium tray-mountActuation
Live · your keystrokes, modelled

Where the energy sits.

Below four hundred hertz, the brass and the foam do the work: they lower the fundamental and they stop it ringing. Above that, the keycap does. Thick PBT rounds off the click at the top of the stroke and leaves the note underneath.

The chart is a measured decay envelope: our board against a tray-mounted aluminium 75% with the same switches and caps. Same finger, same desk, same microphone. The only variable is the stack.

Type on your keyboard and the oscilloscope models what it would sound like here. Turn the sound on if you want to hear it.

Decay to silence38 msAgainst 210 ms for the tray-mount reference. That's the difference between a note and a chord.
Fundamental180–260 HzLow, because there is 2.1 kg under it. A hollow board lives an octave up.
Key-to-key variance< 3 dBCorners sound like the centre. Stabilised keys sound like the keys next to them.
Reserve

Built to order. Built once.

We make a batch a month, in the order the reservations came in. Yours is fully refundable until the day it ships.

Live · Basalt, Bone
Cairn 75
$389
Ships in four weeks. Free shipping worldwide, duties paid.
Case finish Basalt
Switch Cairn Linear
Keycaps Bone
Reserve yours$389
In the box. The keyboard, assembled and tuned. A braided USB-C cable. A keycap and switch puller in a brass sleeve. Four spare gasket strips. A card with the serial and the name of the person who listened to it.