DIY Keyboard Frames

(Andrew recently shot a segment of the TV show “Deals,” which airs on the Live Well Network. In addition to showing off about a dozen cool Hipcycle products, he also demonstrated a few do-it-yourself upcycling projects. This blog post shows how to make one of those projects.)

Making keyboard picture frames is a lot of fun (glue guns rock!), and super easy. Hipcycle does offer way cool Keyboard Picture Frames for sale on our site, but why not do it yourself if you can? Here’s the tools and supplies you will need:

Materials:

• Old computer keyboards
• An old picture frame, or a frame you’ve made yourself from scrap wood or whatever else you just knew you should not be throwing away.

Tools:

• Hot melt glue gun
• Butter knife

Here’s how you do it:

1. Pop the keys off the keyboards using the butter knife. You may need to give it a little twist, but it should pop right out. It may go flying, so if you are concerned about this, you may want to wear protective eyewear. You may also want to collect multiple keyboards to give yourself more color choices when you assemble the pattern of your keys for the frame, or if you want to go really ambitious and try to spell something out on the frame.
2. Have a frame ready. Use old frames that are going to get tossed, or make your own from scrap wood or other material. The key thing is to have a frame that has a flat surface to hold the keys. I got my frames from the thrift store for 50 cents. They were way

   Keys glued together on a flat surface.

   ugly, and were surely destined for the landfill if I hadn’t rescued them.

3. Start gluing keys together in a pattern. I went for a black and white checkerboard design. Just glue to each other and not to the frame just quite yet. As you glue each key together, make sure you do it on a flat surface, so that when you do finally glue them to the frame, you have maximum touch points for the glue.Note that Most keys are not completely flat on the back. Rather, they are raise up on a little “foot.” You can actually use this feature to your advantage, as the foot gives the key greater height, which makes the finished frame pop out a little more. However, due to this characteristic, it’s super important to do that gluing on a flat surface.
4. As you get enough keys glued together, and the glue has dried (usually only takes a few seconds), position them on top of the frame to see spacing. Do you need another column or row? I prefer to go over the edge of the frame a bit rather than leave any of the original frame exposed underneath.
5. Keep going with gluing and spacing your glued keys on the frame, and when you have them all positioned, glue them down to the frame.

Notice I used all the same keys for most of the frame, but went a little crazy on the bottom with some space bars and CTRL keys and other such lunacy.

That’s it! Again, it’s super easy, and glue guns are fun. Give a try!

Andrew Sell is Chief Hipcycler at Hipcycle, which sells attractive, durable and reasonably-priced upcycled products. He assures you that keyboards were definitely harmed in the making of this tutorial (but they were junk anyway), and that he did not sniff any of the glue.