Suggestion for Airgap Bitcoin Core - Comments? Lesson learned the hard way: I lost a small value of bitcoins due to foolishly  backing up private keys to a file which was uploaded to a cloud server. My wallet used to be bitcoin core.

Right now my keys are in electrum with an air gapped laptop wallet and a watching wallet.

I'd prefer to use bitcoin core because having my own blockchain is preferable.

I know you can use bitkey, but as a Windows user, but it seems too complex. 

I'm considering the following solution, and would welcome comments.

Currently, I still run bitcoin core with an empty wallet, on my desktop PC connected to the internet. The blockchain is on a separate SSD disk and I run the empty wallet to keep the blockchain up to date. 

I would then keep a core wallet holding the keys to my coins, on the air gapped laptop. When I want to send or receive bitcoins I would move the SSD to the laptop. The SSD would use a SATA to USB connector, so it would be an easy plug in. As soon as I'd done the send or receive I would move the SSD back to the internet PC.

I assume that the blockchain on the SSD would resynch the send and receive transactions.

I could use Electrum Personal Server, but this means running other stuff which I don't understand. Armory is another option, but I'd prefer to stick with core.

Is my approach feasible? Secure? Overkill?
If I understand you correctly, Im not sure your system will work, because your air-gapped laptop is never connected to the internet, the transaction wont get broadcast.  You can try it, I may be wrong.

I have done a similar process using rawtransactions, where you prepare the rawtransaction on an online computer, using an explorer API (https://chainz.cryptoid.info/api.dws is one that I found works) you get the tx input and vin, create the rawtransaction and save the hex output to a small USB (smaller the better).  Then on your airgapped machine use signrawtransaction to sign it, then transfer that hex output back to the online machine and sendrawtransaction.

I automated that process in Python, you can see how it works in more detail on my github https://github.com/Scalextrix/coinofflinewallet

It worked with QR codes as well for a fully airgapped solution, but I had a lot of trouble with the Python webcam/QRcode libraries and ended up not bothering.  My code is not extensively tested, its really an example, you should validate it fully before use.