Hi guys, I'm looking for a place to get some sheet metal laser cut, bent and ideally powder coated as well. I received a quote for my custom HDD cages from a shop in northern Ireland £392 exc. tax & shipping, that's 445€ or US$640 +20% tax And that's without powder coating. I was hoping in something around half that price but I really have no idea on the acceptable price for such orders: Would you know of places in Europe able to do such metal work that may be cheaper ?
...why not just get regular HDD cages and glue them together? Scrappies > Computer case > Old HDD cage (and some extra metal)
Too widely spread vertically, and I want hotswap I'm not too sure how to go about doing that without wasting space. I need to keep the assembly as narrow as possible or else 5870 length video cards will not fit.
The best way is always to know someone. Check all of your friends and see if any of them know somebody with daily access to a CNC. Get a friend's-friend's- coworker to make one for your after hours, and bend it yourself. Works for me.
I looked into that already but these cages have the worst airflow ever imaginable. No rubber dampening either. Plus I already have the backplanes.
Honestly that looks extremely similar to Lian-Li's hard drive cage design, and I can tell you that you will need a full high precision automated bending brake and die and stamp to make what you have just shown us a cad model of. That would cost you thousands. My advice is to first simplify your design, as few brakes as possible and the less holes the better. Your best bet really is to buy a premade part and modify it
Well not quite thousands since I juts got a quote for £392 exc tax. It is indeed based on a PC-A70F drive cage, only more compact and with hot swap. Can you explain why "the less holes the better" ? Is it for laser cutting cost or to simplify the bending process?
cutting costs really. the more length of cut and the more non continuous cut the more its going to cost. considering the pound versus the dollar which I was referring to, 392+tax is pretty close to 1000 US Was reading your log at the link in your sig and I can tell you definitively that a feser monsta rad with fans will NOT fit in the bottom of the 2010 with the PSU in there (I have worked extensively with the 2110 as you may know). I would highly suggest you go with a thermochill PA140.3 which can operate well with only one set of fans and is much thinner.
Can't help with the shops. But have you thought about using some acrylic? Would have to be 5 or 8mm to get the rigidity. But you could buy some pretty cheap and a have at it with drills, dremels, jigsaws, axes, flamethrowers. Whatever you have laying around. I have used http://www.trentplastics.co.uk/online/index.php a few times if you are interested.
Thanks for the ideas guys. Thanks for the link, I'll bookmark this as the selection and prices are pretty damn good ! Maybe I'm just being too anal but before I started modeling my cages I had even turned down this cage model: http://www.performance-pcs.com/cata...=product_info&cPath=130_210&products_id=20584 12/14 drives in raid 5 will generate a fair bit of vibrations or resonance, which is why I wanted rubber mounts. I also want slide in hot swap on this one which makes the design a lot more complex. The cages are going in the top compartment of my V2010 and if you have a quick look at my worklog you'll see it's already kinda tight for long GPUs (the one you'll see is a roughly modeled 5870). All these reasons made me go the custom fabricated route. The quote feels really high for what it is though, and I just want to see if I can find a better deal.
That quote is what I would call a fair price actually, if I didnt make that clear already good luck mate, looks like a fine project you have going so far
