Re: gEDA-user: any place that fabs custom project boxes?

[Stephen Trier <stephen.trier+geda@xxxxxxxxx>]

   If you're looking for production quantities, pretty much every
   enclosure maker, whether plastic or metal, advertises their willingness
   to customize.  There may be a hefty tooling fee, and they may or may
   not be interested in small orders. Find a company that makes something
   similar to what you want and ask.

   If you can find a standard case that is close to what you want, look
   for a local machine shop that can modify it to your specs. This is good
   for moderate quantities, but might be too much for qty. 1 unless you
   have a friend with a milling machine in his basement.  We did this a
   lot in a previous job I had, where we had typical production quantities
   between 10 and 200 units.

   Similarly, some pretty nice cases can be made from drilled and folded
   sheet steel or aluminum.  Those could be fabbed for you by any
   convenient machine shop.  One-time costs will be fairly low, and
   per-unit prices can be pretty reasonable if you keep the design simple
   to manufacture.  These could be any scale of production from 5 to tens
   of thousands.

   If it's one-off or very low quantities, and you have the budget, you
   could go to one of the many 3-D printing places online, such as
   Shapeways ([1]www.shapeways.com).  You might end up paying $100+ for a
   case this way, depending on its size, but it will be 100% custom and
   any shape you can imagine.

   Similarly, you could assemble a case from laser-cut parts from an
   outfit like Ponoko ([2]www.ponoko.com).

   As for software, the mechanical engineers at my workplace design cases
   in Solidworks.  It looks very expensive.  :-)  Some of the
   hobbyist-oriented 3-D printing houses accept Google Sketchup, which (I
   think?) has a no-cost version.  A sheet metal case could be designed in
   any 2-D or 3-D CAD package or even a drawing program if you're careful.
   Finally, Ponoko accepts Inkscape files, among others. Inkscape is Free
   (GPL, IIRC) and has both Linux/Unix and Windows versions.
          Stephen

References

   1. http://www.shapeways.com/
   2. http://www.ponoko.com/


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