President Bob Guenser sums up the history of Signature Plastics, creator and manufacturer of keycap profiles like SA and DSA, on occasion of preparing for retirement and searching for buyer candidates.
Bob Guenser
Creators! Feel free to tip me off about your keyboard related projects to bring them to 100K readers.
This is a republication of a document originally attached to this Signature Plastics announcement – with the permission of Melissa Petersen.
The story of Signature Plastics begins with a man named John Cavers and a company called Comptec. Cavers came from the transistor industry where he was Managing Director of the General Instrument/C.P. Clare group of companies. He closely watched the evolution of computers from mainframes to minicomputers to microcomputers and quickly realized that, as computers became more accessible and more affordable, a market would develop for keycaps for personal computers.
After visualizing a two-stage injection molding process, in 1969 he established Keytronic Corporation in Spokane, Washington. However, Cavers failed to convince his business partners to adopt his insert molding approach, so in 1973 he left the company and returned to his home near Vancouver, Canada, where he started Comptec. Partnering with a local machine shop, McLean Tooling, Cavers set out on a mission to grow Comptec into the largest independent keycap manufacturer in the world.
With some of the most talented German tool makers in the industry working with a creative team of elite design engineers, Comptec began developing a unique, cost-effective method to manufacture keycaps for the emerging computer market. Securing contracts with Bunker Ramo, Cortron, Chomerics and Amp Switch, proprietary tooling was designed and built based on Caver’s two-shot, insert molding concept. It proved to be very successful.
Soon after, Comptec began building molds to produce their own keycap profiles. Tooling was designed with quick-change components to simplify molding the keycap mounting stem that allowed the keys to be functional on any switch style. There were over 100 different switch manufacturers competing to dominate the mechanical switch market.
To produce the graphic insert, brass plates were engraved with mirror images of customer specified words, letters, numbers, and symbols using a Gorton Pantograph machine. These legend plates were secured in the cavity side of the first mold opposite a ‘grid pin’ located on the core side of the mold. The grid pin helped form a carrier for the small letters, words, and numbers so they could be easily inserted into a second mold.
The second mold formed the keycap shape as well as the switch mounting detail located on the underside of the keycap. Custom mechanical part loading and removal equipment was installed on small tonnage injection molding machines making it possible to produce tens of thousands of parts a day.
Over the next four years, Comptec would design and build five unique keycap families. The first of these families, SA, was built in 1980. These keys closely resembled familiar typewriter keys with a high profile, a spherical (S) touch surface, and a uniform look across all (A) rows on the keyboard.
Soon after a modified version of the SA family was built which gave each row of keycaps a slightly different tilt, resulting in a sculptured style keyboard profile that many users found more comfortable while typing.
