Possible Case for Spooky - Page 3

There you have it.

I'm sorry I have not had much time on my hands. When I do I'll put some scribbles together.

I'll se what I can do. Need to work out how much in materials first...

After looking over the design I feel that it could fit in a 26" wide 12" tall 12" deep form factor. The smaller we go the less materials are used. To lessen fabrication costs I would reccomend a pair of LianLi motherboard trays like I use in my techstation builds. These can rest on acrylic supports fused to the acrylic sides.

If we are talking about using Acrylic for the structure we need a 48" x 96" x 1/4"to make up the 5 26" x 12" pieces and two 12" x 12" panels. We could skip the Lian Li mobo trays but I would then have to devote a fair amount of time in fabricating some kind of backplane to hold the cards (which the Lian Li Mobo has built in).

Price for a full sheet of 1/4" is $132.86 before shipping. Roughly $150

If you want to use premade trays by Lia Li they run about $40 each.

So at $230 you have the base materials sans expendables. That leaves $170 for labor. Or no trays and an acrylic wonderland for me with a $250 ticket to ride the train from fabrication station to functional junction

Except for the amount of time it will take to design and protype the case I would hope to only spend a day in cutting/routing/shaping/sanding/polishing but ya never know. This is if I am not making a lot of intricate parts.

Then a day assembling.

This is not including any real fancy stuff. Just a simple rack with mounting points and holes for two 480 GTX and a bottom compartment for w/e with no brackets and upper compartment with rails to accept a pair of Lian Motherboard Trays.

That much I feel confident I could do in two days...they might be long days or short days but I feel I could build the unit in that span of time.

This is with all the panels fused in place (no hardware fasteners or supports) acrylic superstructure and Lian Li trays. All Acrylic and some other custom parts and tooling (like motherboard stand offs) might be a day or two longer.

Eithr way, that's about what I feel is fair for $400. Anything more elaborate would have to cost more.

Options I would suggest: HDD caddy X 2; Proper bay for Optical Drive X 2;proper backplane for PSUs X 2.

These are the parts that take that extra time to design and fabricate with the required precision. All parts will need to be handmade: there is no CNC or lasercutting facility at CDPC right now...I would be cutting/shaping/sanding/polishing each piece...and going from 7 large 4 sided pieces to dozens of multi sided pieces will add up quickly in terms of time.

This is where using prebuilt parts will save a lot of fabrication time. Lian Li makes a couple of different styles of HDD caddy that could fit the build...or parts from a used acrylic case could be retooled. Not saying your design requirements are too difficult: just pointing out where you may need to adjust your budget to fully realize your idea.

I inevitablly do more for my clients than they ask and always spend 2 to 3 times the time on the build as I charge for. I don't let it leave the bench until I want to own it

Sig worthy

Instead of buying the acrylic from usplastics why don't you just get it from Home Depot. I got a full sheet there the other day for 75 bucks.

Home Depot does not sell 8 foot sheets of 1/4" acrylic. They sell 4 x 4 sheets.