Materials, Materials, Materials. What a question. Referring back to my original goals, I needed the casing material to be cheap, light and locally available. I needed the same from the fasteners. Part of being a cheap component is the workability of the component, or simply "Do I have the tools to do this, or am I gonna have to buy the part AND the tools..."



For construction ease, I wanted everything mounted to one common backplane. I opted for a 12"x24" 22Ga. Steel sheet. For the fasteners I decided on 4-40 hardware, as the ground donuts on just about everything in this laptop has 4 Ga. holes in it (go figure) and 4-40 hardware was available locally. Let me say for the record that I really, really, really wish I could find 4-40 threaded rod, or a beefy rod with 4-40 tapped ends. Really, really wish. To get the necessary height on the LCD, I ended up threading six 4-40 jackscrews end to end, as you will see here in a minute. This is a far less than ideal situation, and I will probably have to buy some aluminum tubes to go around the screws to reinforce them at some point. For now they work, but they're not quite bulletproof enough for my tastes. (I tend to be extremely hard on things, to the point that I have been known to twist screwdriver handles off their shafts.)



UPDATE: Thanks to Parallax I now have replaced the wobbly stack of screws with a single 4-40 standoff.



Anyway, enough about parts, and on with construction.

First and foremost, I had to get that 12x24 sheet cut down to two 12x10's, and in that there was a choice to be made on how to cut it. Do I use snips? A nibbler? A mechanical shear? Snips bend the metal as they cut, so they're out, and a shear would have taken an extra three days to cut it at the university (weekend project after all...) so I used a manual nibbler. Yes, I know. Stupid.



All in all, I nibbled over five linear feet in two days on this project, BY HAND and I have the bruises to prove it. For the love of <expletive deleted> find someone with a shear (or at least a pneumatic nibbler)!!!



After cutting (argh...) the plates, I measured the bottom one, drilled it and mounted the hardware.



(You'll notice the four large holes at the top for the power unit are missing, and there is a standoff on the right side that was not on the original layout. The new standoff is for a mobo mounting hole that I originally missed, and I did not drill the four holes for the power unit since I found a new way to permanently attach it to the plate without drilling holes. (Kneadatite epoxy putty. Buy some. You'll need it. It's like JB Weld that really does what the label claims it does))

