Dear fellow modders, I have being reading through post, guides and many project logs over the past 7 or 8 months and can say i have been simply blown away. This is basically what has inspired me to begin my first mod. I have been working on my design for about 4 months now and hopefully have it finished in my 2 week holidays (woot no school).As i have never done any modding work with plexi and have very little experience with the material i need a little help with my fan grills. My question is, is my design to thin? and will it snap easily, if so any suggestions on how to improve on this?. I'm not to happy with the thickness of the letters at the moment im think it needs to be a bit thicker, what do you think? here is my design of my fan grill (first time using sketchup). Thanks goes out to Scooby from the SketchUp collection for the 80mm fan. Also the grill will be for a 80mm fan. Kind regards, Region
Yep, the insides are pretty frail looking The mounting posts and outer ring look good with the mesh though. I'd go with just that. Thicker letters would help. The VU meter parts are just asking to be snapped off or bent, though. -and welcome to BT.
I have to agree. It's likely you'll end up bending something out of place and not mean to. You'd just have to be *very* careful with it. While looking around for custom perforated aluminum, I found a piece of advice that sort of applies here: Any part of your design that leaves a small bit of material left (i.e. like the many small strips you have) should always be wider than the thickness of the material you are using. Any thinner and it will be too weak. And, of course, the thicker, the better. Hope that wasn't too redundant. - L J
Damn! It would be really hard to cut that out without breaking it! There's a hexagonal mesh underneath your custom grill, so if that mesh is thick and strong/stiff, and you were to glue your grill to that mesh, then you'd probably just need to increase the thickness of all the thin bits to say twice as thick, and it should be fine. If that hexagonal mesh is thin enough to flex, then the plexi could still crack quite easily, even at double thickness. How about making it out of 1mm or better yet 2mm thick alluminium? With 2mm thickness, you could do the original design and it would be kinda tough!
Yeah i was thinking about doubling the width of my design than using a metal cut out the same shape of the perspex, than gluing the metal to the back of the perspex. But than again the metal would also be to flexible . I might look into making it out of 2mm alluminium, than spraying it to the colour i want or maybe even use some AC Ryan UV paint. Not sure what i will do yet. Thanks for the advice, Region
You might have better luck incorporating your design into a case window. I mean, from what I see, it'll decrease your fan performance. A fan grill is intended to protect one's fingers from being injury, and to prevent other foreign objects from damaging the fan and other hardware. Stick with a hex mesh grill, or similar, and put place your design elsewhere.
then * 3 Yeah it is a little restrictive, but if you go with 2mm alloy, and just change the orginal design a little so that the gaps between all the 'fins' are bigger, to say the same sort of thickness as the fins themselves, then you wouldn't have any restriction. I'm guessing you wanted to make it out of uv perspex? Uv paint on alloy sounds alot more easier & tougher. I would cry or scream or something if i spent that much time on a perspex grill then cracked it!
