Assembly

Let’s start the assembly with the PCB.

If you want to solder your 1337 with the Mill-Max sockets then you should start with those. You can find Instructions on how to solder Mill-Max Sockets here. You also can solder the switches directly. If you want to do that skip the Mill-Max soldering.

After that get yourself the ribbon cable. Seperate the ends and strip them. They should look like this.

Put them into the PCB and solder them in. Solder them from the side where you can read the lables for the holes (GND, VCC…). If you are having troubles getting them in there you can also seperate the cables completely.

Put the PCB into the case and place a few switches in there. We will temporarily place the PCB in there to cut the ribbon cable to the right lenght. You will have to take off the bottom plate and OLED covers for this.

Straighten out the cable and cut it roughly at the edge of the case. If you have never isolated cables before you should try it out first and leave the cable a little bit longer. That shouldn’t be a problem.

Now take out the PCB again and solder in the OLED. Be aware of the orientation here! If you turn it the wrong way around the OLED will not work and also will not fit into the case.

Onto the encoder! If you don’t know how to solder an encoder you can find instructions on that here.

Be careful here so that you don’t touch other small components!

Now put all switches into the case.

Push the PCB onto the switches. If you have Mill-Maxed your 1337 this will require a bit of force and accuracy. If you have not Mill-Maxed your 1337 solder in your switches now. Make sure to press the PCB completely onto the switches so that it sits nicely.

Put the OLED through the bottom of the case and place it on top of the ledge.

Put on the bottom plate. The plate is not symetrical! The bottom plate has two cutouts that go in the back to the USB port and OLED wires. Make sure that your bottom plate sits flush in there.

Screw in the bottom plate now. Don’t tighten the screws too much. You are screwing right into plastic and the screws don’t need to hold much anyway.

Place the two OLED covers on there and screw them together. You also want to remove the protective cover before that. Also check, if you have cables sticking out from the top. If you do, clip them off so that the cover will fit.

You need to put a bit of force on the back for the screw to grab the back piece. But again don’t tighten the screws to much. You have a screen sitting under there that can crack.

Screw in the nut for the Encoder.

Put on the knob and tighten the screw from the side.

Put on your keycaps as a last step.

And you are done with your 1337!