fellas!
Well, the second round of internal frame piece construction was still frustrating me. Ultimately, that evolved into a third round, but I think I finally got it right. I decided while possible, the fourth central rad was really not in my foreseeable plans, so I would stop struggling to make it work and just went with my original concept of fans only in the center of the case.
Go figure, it worked.
After a quick trip down the street to a local shop for a 2' by 4' sheet of 1.6 mm aluminum; and after a weekend and some change sawing, sanding, sweating and occasionally swearing...
I had these four pieces:
Taped together, they make a now familiar sight:
And dry fit into the case:
One thing I did this round was take my time with the finish work while in progress, to save me headaches later. My new sheet of aluminum was in good shape, so I carefully taped it all off before I even started measuring.
I also took the time to carefully finish any cuts I made that will be visible later. This is after sanding with 80>150>220>400>600>800>1000>1500:
The motivation for the above finish work came when I tested out quick straight-to-polish piece of the factory mill finish on the aluminum. This is after maybe 2 minutes of rubbing with Mother's:
Too easy, and should make for some nice details on the bits of the frame that don't end up clad in brushed aluminum.
I'm going into a 2 and a half day weekend before work picks back up heavy for me, so I'm planning on a real blitz this weekend.
Stay tuned.
