It started in my brother's dining room.

In 2013 my brother ordered an ErgoDox through Massdrop. Before it arrived, I found the open-source PCB files and built ten of them myself: one for him, nine for people on Deskthority and Geekhack who wanted one too.

The first batch was hand-soldered with a plain stick iron, on his dining room table. So was every batch since. Better iron now, different table, nothing else has changed.

He helped at the start, then went back to his own work. I stayed.

Half a year later the company I worked for went under. I had no job, and I had ten keyboards behind me, so I registered a business and gave it a try. Nobody was doing this back then. A split ergonomic keyboard was something most people had never seen, and making them for a living sounded like a bad idea.

That was 2014. FalbaTech has been running ever since.

For the first two years I worked out of my parents' basement.

In 2014 the workshop was very simple - one CNC mill for aluminum and PVC, a blue steel workbench, and a homemade enclosure made of PVC strips. Early on I was making mostly PVC cases.

The mill kept breaking down, and I kept fixing it.

Soon after, the first 40W CO₂ laser joined the workshop. That one was a real disaster - constant failures, mirror alignment, power supply and cooling issues. Some weeks I spent more time on repairs than on actual work.

In spite of all that, the first proper batches of keyboards started coming out of that basement.

In 2017 the first proper batch came out of the workshop - 23 wooden keyboard cases drying at the same time, on a single table.

That's when I realized people actually wanted these keyboards.

Rented unit - one fire and two water damage incidents.

In parallel, starting in 2015, I rented a small unit in Lidzbark - in a former discotheque that had since been turned into a fruit wholesale warehouse. Some of the heavier work moved there; some of it stayed in the basement.

I had to give up on that place eventually. There was one fire (something fairly common when you're machining wood with CNC) and two floods. By 2018 I'd had enough - I bought my own pavilion.

In 2021, during the pandemic, I moved the workshop out of the city and into the countryside.

That's when the current workshop in Ciborz came together - its own building, CNC mills, lasers, 3D printers, solar panels, a deep well, and an on-site biological wastewater treatment system.

One basement. Four locations. One fire. Three water damage incidents. Twelve years of work. Still here.

Everything is made here.

Every keyboard, case, plate, wrist rest, and accessory in the FalbaTech catalog is made in this workshop.

No outsourcing. No “designed in Poland, manufactured elsewhere” small print.

This workshop has flooded once, too. I rebuilt it.

Keyboards kept shipping.

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Built for independence, step by step.

Solar panels on the roof generate part of the energy used by the CNC mills, lasers, and 3D printers. Full off-grid operation is the goal, but in Poland, winter sunlight makes that a real challenge.

In winter, the workshop is heated by a wood-burning stove, fed with offcuts and scraps from production.

Water comes from our own deep well on the property. Wastewater goes through an on-site biological treatment system. No municipal water supply. No municipal drain.

We also have a homemade PET recycling line. Today, we use it less often because more bottles return through the deposit system, but when the material is available, we can turn it into 3D printing filament and use it for workshop-made accessories.

Whatever cannot become a product comes back to the workshop as energy. Whatever leaves the workshop, leaves with purpose.