Pedal to the Metal

I've made some great progress with the case in the last few days and I'm quite pleased with the results so far. I bought some aluminium sheet (2000mm x 1000mm x 1.2mm thickness) from a company in Cardiff. It was only £35! Bargain.

I used our metal cutter in work (very impressive machine - chops throgh sheet metal like a hot knife through butter ) to cut all the pieces to size. I then used a metal folding machine to bend the pieces at right angles so that it can be "pinned" to the MDF frame. (I am going to use 3mm machine screws to hold it all in place.

I have also designed 2 more pieces in CAD to fir the front and rear of the case. I made the outer edges 1.2mm thick so that it will be flush (fingers crossed) with the pieces on top and on the bottom. These two extra pieces need to be routed by InStyle routing services.

Next stage after this is to get the aluminium sheets powder coated white.

Oh and by they way you may have noticed that the MDF has now been painted with 2 coats primer. I used a small cheap roller to put the paint on evenly. It's not the best finish but these struts will never be seen anyway...so who cares.

If I was going to do this project again I would make the three struts out of aluminium. Not because it doesn't have strength, but because it would have looked much more like a real product rather than a project...if you get what I mean? I must admit the threaded rods are complete overkill, I could have got away with leaving them out. Oh well. It ain't going to fall apart, that's for sure.