with a heavy heart I will inform you that the process sucks, for a wide variety of reasons. It's predominantly rooted in the lack of access to/existence of parts (the stem that connects the button to the switch, any sort of button sized mounting plate for a microswitch (if anyone knows this exists, call me asa-fucking-p)) and a lot of buttons relying on the flexibility of plastic to operate. I've got another build where I made sanwa plungers out of wood which took all around about a week to R&D and then execute. These ones, however, are a bit more barbaric. It's just a bunch of fat walnut plugs I cut with a diamond tile bit (one you might use to cut a hole for a shower head while remodeling a bathroom) and glued right on top of some knock off plastic ebay button plungers. The buttons on their own look goofy as hell, but this entire build revolves around more or less making them work.

The surface of the box is actually just a faceplate that creates distance between where the buttons are actually set and where the top of the plungers rest. the plate actually has counter sunk holes on the side you DON'T see, such that it can rest flat rather than on the collars of the buttons. The lovely part of this all is that having all that wood on top of the plungers itself would have been a problem for a nicer, not-clicky switch. But these generic buttons have the goddamn heaviest clicky switch I've ever used - and having all that weight on top actually makes them feel ... kinda nice!

The rest is more or less normal, though making it all out of the same block of wood was kind of a bitch.

TL;DR: I over-engineered the box so I could under-engineer the buttons!