Once I had the outer shell built and all of the cables run, I had to make everything secure. This was a very organic process. Everything up to this point had been carefully planned ahead of time, but I just couldn’t figure out this step until I could see all of the parts laid out in the case. I tried a few different things so it’s a bit of a hodgepodge.

The laptop was held in place with a mix of hand cut plastic brackets and self-stick insulation foam, the kind you’d use to weather seal a window. I stuck down the cables with a bit of gaff tape to keep them from moving around. I used some styrene rails to hold the USB hub and SD card reader in place, along with more tape. I knew I would need to completely immobilize that VGA adapter or it would fall out the first time I picked the deck up, so I build a little platform to hold it up out of scrap styrene and put square tube rails all around it.

At this point things were sort of secure, but the laptop was going to need more support, and the whole case was going to need to be more sturdy. I grabbed a big pile of scrap styrene and just started cutting and gluing pieces into it anywhere that I could fit them, dividing up the interior into smaller boxes to give it more rigidity and hem in the parts. Having done all that I had to go back and finish the lid I made earlier. I had to cut several notches out of the edging so it would fit around the internal bracing.

I also needed to cut a hole in it to expose the keyboard. This was a little tricky. I ended up cutting a piece of cardstock to the exact shape I wanted, then I used a piece of double sided tap to stick it to the keyboard exactly covering what I wanted exposed. Next I put several more pieces of double sided tape on top of the template and carefully closed the lid on it. When I removed the lid I now had the card stock template stuck to it exactly where I needed to cut the hole. After cutting the hole and the other modifications the lid didn’t fit quite as well as it used to, but close enough.

At this point I have a box full of hardware with a lid that fits on with friction. It would work as a desktop machine but it has a ways to go. The next step was to add the handle. I bought a replacement mountain bike grip from a bicycle shop and a drawer handle from Ikea. The drawer handle was a type that used a pair of standoffs that the mounting screws passed through to the handle itself which was a rod. I got this kind so that I could slip the bike grip over the rod and then screw the standoffs in place. I stuck a little foam inside the grip to make it fit snuggly over the handle and then screwed the whole assembly to the side of the case.

I was worried about the screws tearing out of the styrene walls so I cut down a small piece of wood and whittled it to match the dimensions of the space and put the mounting screws through that. The wood is hidden inside the case and it distributes the weight to one whole side of it rather than just on the screw holes. To hold the lid in place and cover the ends of the handle I built a set of boxes that fit over the corners. These where for both structure and style. The plan was to put bolts through them to hold everything together, but this was a little harder to sort out than I expected.