Building the case

On the 3rd August, I popped over to the B&Q, fetched a big sheet (8'x4') of 18mm Chipboard off the shelf, and set about finding someone to run the big saw to chop it into manageable pieces for me.  This proved harder than I expected, as it seems running the saw is a job to be dodged at my local B&Q.

Finally found someone, and got them to turn one sheet into this:



The idea is to make a 30" high by 30" wide case, so I got the man to cut it 3x30" parts, then cut the 30" by 4' down to 30" by 30".

So I ended up with 3 x 30" x 30" panels, 3 x 30" x 18" panels, and a 6" by 4' panel.

I want the finished case to have a single panel on the front, so when it's put together, I see only one panel from the front, without side or top "bits" so I split one of the 30's into 2 x 15"x30" for my sides, thus:



I did draw for some cut-outs on the side panels to give a more "arcade machine feel" to the design, but quickly realised that not only would it be harder to construct a front to fit the cut-outs, but the PC would have very little room inside the case.

DESIGN NOTES: It's worth pointing out at this point that I've decided to sacrifice a few aspects of the design.  It's important to me to get this finished now, so I will be cutting the odd corner here and there, but I still want something relatively authentic (nice?) to look at, so will try not to sacrifice too much.  I'm not going to have an access panel in the case section as per earlier designs - I'm going to screw the panel to the case unit, and unscrew when I need to fix/upgrade something.  Hopefully this will be rare.  Anything to do with software/files on the machine I can do remotely over the network.  Ubuntu/Linux gives me enormous flexibility and control that Windows simply doesn't provide

Trim 2 of the 18"x30" off-cuts down to 15" (minus the thickness of 2 sides = 36mm) and I now have two sides, a top, a bottom, a back and a front.

Put all but the back together and we get this:



And with the front:



Under the control panel - open and closed:



You might see a little ledge at the back? I could claim it's deliberate but it's not.  I'd not taken into account how much room the control panel needed when opened, so it doesn't meet the back - that's not as important as you might think as I'll be fixing sides onto this beast that will hide these "redesign factors" but also, it gives me the opportunity to drill some holes in that little ledge for ventilation of the case compartment - more on this next