1. Earlier this year, I bought myself a Das Keyboard Ultimate.
2. Time passes, and I am still very happy with the keyboard.
3. Accident happen, forcing me into some serious keyboard cleaning.

According to daskeyboard.com/support it is perfectly safe to remove the small/regular keys (letters, numbers, etc). The larger keys (enter, shift, etc) on the other hand should be left alone, as they apparently are quite hard to get properly back in place.

The mistake I made was to assume that all those blank keys are the same. Trying to reassemble the keyboard I discovered that they actually come in four different heights and angles.

Luckily the friendly people at Das Keyboard Support managed to give me a few pointers. Apparently the keys are “horizontality” arranged. The picture below will hopefully illustrate which key types belong at which lines.

(The picture is used, and modified, by permission from Das Keyboard Support.)

If you look underneath the keys you will notice that some of them are marked as R1, R2 or R3. Yes, that marking correspond with the key types one, two and three, respectively. The exception being the keys belonging as F, J and numeric 5.

This blog post probably makes a lot more sense if you know that the Das Keyboard Ultimate is completely black, without any inscription on its keys what so ever. Knowing a tiny bit of German probably does not hurt either.

• The keyboard is a real full size, rather heavy, solid keyboard. It almost literary screams quality.
• You get a very snappy feedback from all the keys. That really makes the typing much more comfortable.
• By design the keyboard makes the classic “clicky” sound when you type at it. Whatever this is a good or a bad thing probably depends both on your personal preferences as well as your surrounding. Myself I would most likely have preferred a more quiet keyboard.
• I really think it is a shame that there is a red and white “daskeyboard” logo up in the right corner. Would have been much slicker with a completely black keyboard; kind of like the stunt ship in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
• Having an internal USB 2.0 hub in the keyboard is something which has turned out to be a lot more convenient than I imagined. It definitely feels more accessible than using a hub in the monitor.

In short, yes I’m very happy with my new keyboard.