As for having a professional do the job, ask jewellers. If they do repairs on-site, they're likely used to doing precision welding and braising.

For a period of four or five years, I used the qwerty layout at work (on a shared DOS computer), and the Dvorak layout at home, spending about half of my typing time on each. During that time, my Dvorak speed increased to 90 wpm, and my qwerty speed reached 80 wpm. My accuracy improved slightly on both layouts. On the Dvorak layout, my most common typos are reversing two letters, whereas on the qwerty layout, it's more common for me to hit the wrong key altogether.

In the mid 1950s, U.S. Government's General Services Administration commissioned a study by Earle Strong to confirm Dvorak's results. Strong's study, which included proper controls and which was set up to allow direct comparison of qwerty and Dvorak data, found that after sufficient training, Dvorak typists were able to match their previous qwerty speeds, but not surpass them.

U.S. Navy selected fourteen typists for a 1944 study to assess whether Dvorak retraining would be feasible. Dvorak found that it took an average of only 52 hours of training for those typists' speeds on the Dvorak keyboard to reach their average speeds on the qwerty keyboard. By the end of the study their Dvorak speeds were 74 percent faster than their qwerty speeds, and their accuracies had increased by 68 percent.