Mobile Keyboard Cover for Apple A1314 Keyboard

Just the other day….

For several years now, I have had an Apple A1314 mobile keyboard for my successive iPads.

What has always bothered me is that the keyboard is great but absolutely unprotected during transport. Since it is a mobile keyboard that I tend to use frequently, I carry it around a lot, and always in a backpack, where keys are constantly pushed!

So far it hasn‘t hurt the keyboard, but it is constantly reawakened which also wakes my tablet….

Yes, shame on me, but I simply never got around to doing something about it.

….until a couple of days ago, when my wife brought a loaf of carrot-bread from a local bakery, that is baked in a small wooden basket.

That little basket is actually not made of a simple veneer, but a two-layer plywood with only about 1 mm thickness. This again is quite stable to work with and ideal to be repurposed a stable cover.

So, lets play….

1. 2 Bread Baskets
2. Water + Clothes Iron
3. Some strips of wood, 10 x 3 mm, 5 x 3 mm
4. Bamboo skewers, 2 mm
5. Glue
6. Scalpel, saw, sandpaper

The little bread baskets are made from thin plywood, which is bent, of course.

So how do you flatten it? Simple - open the basket and get it wet to make the wood more flexible. After a couple of minutes, the wood can be bent straight, but it helps to use an iron on some cardboard to get it as flat as possible and to keep it that way. The cardboard soaks up some of the water and heating the wood with the iron makes it better stay in shape.

I dried the pieces between some newspaper under a few books for a couple of days and it turned out pretty flat.

Since the two pieces of ply were each too small to cover the keyboard, they needed to be combined to form a larger piece.

The surplus sections were cut away with a scalpel and then a narrow strip of material removed from each piece where they were to overlap.

In this way, no extra material is introduced, thickening the plywood, but it simply remains plywood after glueing the two sections together.

I didn‘t work very accurately, since I was as usual a bit rushed.

I definitely wanted to preserve the knot in the wood though.

By itself, the resulting plywood strip is still quite flexible and still has a slight wave, so it needs reinforcements.

I decided that a slip-on cover would be best for my keyboard, so I needed to add a frame around the edges of the plywood strip.

I want to keep the cover minimal - and had only enough plywood for one side anyway - so the frame needs to go around the keyboard and needs to have an edge on its bottom side, so it can‘t fall off.

My keyboard has raised keys, so the cover also needs spacers on each side to keep the cover from pushing down on the keys. For this some bamboo skewers from the kitchen drawer proved exactly the right diameter.

The upper edge of the plywood cover needs to be reinforced with a strip of wood so it won‘t easily press on the keys.

Luckily, I had some short sections of strips of wood left over from another project (iPad Book-Case) that perfectly fit my needs. These were quickly cut to size.

Instead of slow-drying wood glue, I used a quick-drying plastic glue - it was quite late in the evening and I was tired.

I had left the plywood a bit oversized, so I glued the vertical sections together fit with the keyboard itself as template. Once the frame was on semi-rigid, I glued the skewers in to keep the plywood off the keys. Once these stayed well enough in place, I replaced the keyboard and glued the three strips in that hold the cover to the back of the keyboard.

Once this arrangement had dried a bit - ca. 3 min later I removed the almost finished cover and glued the remaining wood strip to remaining free edge of the plywood. Here, I placed two thin leftover strips of ply at each end of the glued wood strip to give it about one millimeter clearance from the surface of the desk and added a few weights on the plywood Torres’s it to the wood strip and create a slight bow during drying. The latter to make sure that the cover will later have no contact to the keys of the keyboard.

The assembly took maybe an hour.

Then I went to bed.

The next morning, I cut the edges of the plywood to remove the excess. Then I sanded everything to round the corners a bit.

The cover slips on quite tight on the keyboard and is extremely light.

Instead of using oil, I varnished it, because the varnish will add a tiny little bit more stability, and will creep it cleaner

This was a really quick and simple fun project, that let me also repurpose things that would normally be thrown away - which I especially enjoy!

The cover does a perfect job and actually looks pretty cool too….

Ok, I could have extended the right side a bit to cover the On/Off button - maybe someday….

Always stay fascinated….