How does one make custom case shell?

[7800fan]

Say for a custom made handheld system or something? With the VGA mod available I thought about converting one of my spare Lynx into a console with separate controller, probably a SMS controller for basic 2 button design. The problem is I don't have any experience in plastic forming and paying someone to do a one time shell won't be cheap.

 

Also how about turning NES deck into one resembling Atari 2600? To poke at when Nintendo wanted Atari to distribute NES in USA. Faux wood grain, 2 switch, no power LED, and 100-feet long RF cable.

[+Stephen Moss]

Mass produced enclosures are made using injection moulding but having looked into that is far too expensive, the enclosures themselves are pennies but in the UK you are look at 5-10K for the tooling.

If you can get a mould machine out of steel or aluminium you make you own using some kind of liquid plastic, but again tooling costs although cheaper than injection moulding may still be prohibitive and liquid plastics are not cheap either.

 

For one off or occasional small runs of custom enclosures your cheapest and best option may be to find a company who does 3D printing, as far as I know this falls into two basic type, one extrudes a plastic filament wound on reels (we have small versions of these at work), ABS is better than the vegetable based PLA for enclosures as it is an engineering plastic. You can get good results with these if you get the print settings correct which obviously a specialist company should do.

As I recall the other more industrial type uses lasers to heat a liquid which then cures where it is heated (or something like that) - probably produces better results than the extrusion method but will probably be more costly than extrusion type.

 

In eiher case all you have to do is provide a file of the item you want printed in the correct format and they should do the rest - personally I used designspark mechanical which is free and it outputs the OBJ and STL file formats required by the Makerbot printers we have at work as well as several other common CAD formats.

 

You could of course purchase you own 3D printer, in the UK small self assemble hobby types go for £250 - £500, preassembled units like the Makerbot the ones we have at work come in at around £1800 for a single head and £2500 for a dual head (two colour printing) and material is about £50 a reel although you can print quite a lot with a reel of material, at a guess I would say possibly 10 Atari Lynx cases @ 100% fill but even at 20% objects can be quite strong although that is object dependant.

[+5-11under]

You could use wood or acrylic or fibreglass.

Vacuum forming plastic is an option, as is plastic resin casting (see Alumilite for example).

[Osgeld]

i have not used them much for plastics but I have used smart-prototyping.com for PCB's and CNC aluminum, they offer injection molding and 3d printing

 

pcb's were average cost for a china fab, the aluminum guage I had them made was fairly cheap, course its in china so shipping times is a factor, but it might be something to look into