In October 2024, we launched the group buy for PBS MV Classic. The overwhelmingly positive market response gave me tremendous confidence in this entirely new sculpted profile that PBS introduced.
In December 2024, I approached designer Max Voltar to ask if the set could join the KAP system After receiving an enthusiastic “yes,” we spent the next five months refining the design, coordinating details, and securing vendors.
One morning during the daily stand-up, while staring at the “classic” legends, I asked the engineers: could we move a portion of the legends onto the side walls of the keycaps—and do it in double-shot? After they confirmed it was possible, I immediately reached out to every distributor; everyone agreed to wait while we developed and tested the tooling.
Our final plan, therefore, is this: every single legend—whether on the top face or the side—will be double-shot, and then we’ll use dye-sub to color those legends.
The technical foundations we’re drawing on are:
- We already know how to incorporate side legends into double-shot molds.
- We have a hybrid process that combines dye-sub with double-shot molding.
- All we have to do is blend these two capabilities once more.
This approach can achieve virtually any color while eliminating the instability, printed-on texture, and sidewall distortion that plague five-sided dye-sub.
After selecting a few of the more complex keys and waiting three weeks, the engineers completed four rounds of mold revisions and prototype runs. final samples
This is the injection molding halfway, paused to reveal the internal structure.
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