Ducky Outlaw 65 review: A $250 premium keyboard kit ships with a cable too short to build. Ducky support's solution? RMA the 2kg kit instead of sending a wire.
Imagine dumping your bitcoin bag to drop $250 on a premium custom keyboard kit. You spend hours hand-lubing every single switch and stab, gently seating the caps, and when you finally go to plug in the daughterboard... you get blue-screened in real life by a cable that is physically too short.
Welcome to the Ducky experience, where standard logic goes to die.
Our story starts with a redditor who built the Ducky ProjectD Outlaw 65 (ISO version). Marketed as a "Premium" flagship kit for enthusiasts, it turns out the internal 5-pin JST-SH bridge cable (PCB to daughterboard) is criminally short. At roughly 25mm, there is zero slack. If you try to bridge the gap, the connector just nopes out of the PCB.
After a week of sending photos and literal ruler measurements to Ducky Support, the OP got this galaxy-brain response: "The original cable is approximately 25 mm. From your installation, your estimate of needing an additional 2-3 mm is reasonable and should provide better flexibility..."
So they admitted the part is defective and too short. Easy hotfix, right? Just stick a 150mm wire in an envelope and mail it.
Nope. Ducky refused, claiming "international shipping is too expensive." Their official, big-corp solution? Tear down the entire build, pack up the 2kg aluminum kit, and RMA the whole thing back to the retailer over a 2-gram wire. They would rather waste a customer’s labor, carbon emissions, and FedEx fees on a massive metal brick than ship a tiny cable. Absolutely unhinged.
(For anyone stuck in the same hell: just buy a 5-Pin JST-SH 1.0mm pitch cable, 100-150mm long, and DIY it).
The post blew up on r/MechanicalKeyboards, and the community had thoughts:
Whether you're writing spaghetti code or building hardware, corporate Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) can be completely brain-dead. Ducky’s stubbornness to strictly follow their "no component-level support" rule instead of using common sense is a classic case of bad management.
If you're diving into the enthusiast DIY market, treat it like an open-source project with no maintainer. Be prepared to be your own tier-3 support, because relying on "Premium" brand tickets will just leave you malding at your desk.
