Packaging, Photos, and Features
The Oaken case is a completely custom case so of course it’s not going to come in fully done up packaging. The case ships in a plane white box that is just slightly wider than a 60% keyboard and inside it comes wrapped up in bubble wrap to keep everything safe. The case itself ships with two halves combined with the leather straps holding everything together. No surprises here.
The Oaken as shipped is basically what you can expect the entire setup to look like once you get the keyboard in it as well. Take the picture below for example, I took this with nothing inside, but you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from this shot compared to one later with our Poker 2 in it. The Oaken is available in four different finishes Red Mahogany, Dark Walnut, Gunstock, and Unstained as well. Our sample is Red Mahogany finish.
The two halves of the case are similar but once you open everything up you can see a whole variety of differences. Both halves are CNCed but the top half, being the lid, lacks all of the distinguishing marks of the bottom half. The bottom has two holes cut into it, one for the USB port on the back edge and the window in the bottom that gives access to the dip switches on the Poker models or the header plug on the Infinity 60%. The bottom has all of the same support structure that we have seen on other custom cases like the acrylic and aluminum cases. Then there are the six mounting holes. Datamancer ships the Oaken with screws in each hole so there isn’t a need for any loose hardware
Although I won’t be going over the installation of the poker 2 into the Oaken until the next section, here we have everything put together. The wood case is noticeably wider than the original Poker 2 case, the original was plastic and was extremely thin around the edges. In order to give the wood case a little more strength the bezel needs to be thicker and this also gave them room to put a raised notch in the bezel so that when you install the top it locks into place.
For the two included leather straps you can select from six different colors, Red, Brown, Black, Blue, Green, and Purple. For our sample they sent it with purple straps, because of that I dug out the JTK Debut keyset that I hadn’t used for this keyboard. The purple of our keyset is a lighter purple, but even so they do go together very well with the purple straps. It’s no surprise that the purple finish has a very steampunk feel given Datamancer’s history as well.
The bottom half of the shells design is very simple from the outside. Like I mentioned previously they did include two holes one for the USB port on the back edge and then the bottom window to access the dip switches. The dip switch access window is actually a little larger than normal and that helps people like me with fat fingers to get in there and flip the switches. Because of the cases thick bezel I was a little worried about access to the USB port on the Poker 2 PCB but they did make sure that hole is big enough to fit the large plastic portion of some of the custom USB cables. I actually ordered a custom cable from Mimic Cable to match this build as well and they have move to a smaller housing. I tested the new cable, an old cable with the large plastic housing, and the stock Poker 2 cable without any issues on all three. Being a custom case there isn’t much going on with the rest of the bottom. There isn’t a need for a large sticker with warranty information or regulatory logos, so Datamancer kept it clean. I do think the case would look sharp with a metal plate on the bottom or even the top though. For feet the case uses four small stick on rubber dimples just like the feet we used on our Infinity 60% build. I would much rather have the extremely wide rubber feet from the stock Poker 2 case, but I know these small feet will get the job done as well.
While I think the purple JTK keycaps that we used on this build look amazing, even a set of stick Poker keycaps would look really good with the Oaken case.
