YouTuber, Marcin Plaza’s laptop keyboard was dying. In his latest video, Plaza rebuilds the budgetLenovolaptop and crams in a full mechanical keyboard.
Plaza manages this by tearing the laptop down to its components. He then “cosplays a mechanical engineer” and redesigned the case. This took him over 12 hours to complete.
The laptop’s new keyboard, the TL84-B, is made byRedragonand was also harvested for parts. Even after getting the finished print of the chassis, Plaza still found the keyboard to be too fat.
Stripping the laptop down to the motherboard, Plaza also shucked aUSB-Cdongle from its shell. The latter half of the video follows the modder as he assembles the final build.
It’s not an overly complex build, with Plaza opting to use the dongle as a hub as a central point of connection. There’s no manual wiring involved until Plaza’s method of hooking up the keyboard.
As Plaza used the hub rather than manually rewiring everything, he had to create a hidden USB-A port. The new chassis has only one USB-A port, with the third hidden inside.
Plaza soldered the connection pins on the USB port to connect the keyboard to the keyboard’s wires.
While Plaza’s editing makes assembly look incredibly hectic, the finished laptop is impressively pleasant on the eyes. Even in its cobbled-together, “jank” way.
This isn’t Plaza’s first time recycling old computers for use. Last month he posted a video where he turned“e-waste” into a DIY home server.
His channelhas 8.12K followers and has slowly been picking up steam recently, with views rising each video. The laptop video has nearly 150,000 views more than the e-waste server video.
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Joel Loynds was Dexerto’s Deputy Tech Editor in the UK team. He has been writing about tech & games for over a decade, specializing in PCs, hardware, and handhelds such as the Steam Deck. He also has bylines at Scan, WePC, PCGuide, Eurogamer, Digital Foundry and Metro UK.
