As a senior project for my HS, I decided to make a computer case. So far I have pretty much finished the design(except for a few details--backplate(dreading that...), and a few constraints left to make...) and I'm gonna start making it VERY soon(100% CNC hehehe), as school is almost over... Below are some rendered shots... all I can say is that I really admire macs(from a design point of view)...
i plan to be using a mixture of sheet metal and aluminum... alot of it depends on pricing... I dont wanna spend alot of money, as I'm going 2 college soon...
If you are doing this with the help of a CNC mill/router - why do you dread the backplate. Heck, with a machine doing the cutting - that's a peice of cake!
well i made the backplate for all the i/o connectors once already in Inventor(autocad software), and that was just such a pain that I dont wanna do it again(i need 2 cuz i changed the design aroun--***!!)... as for special hardware, prolly nothing special... i only made room for 2 HDs and 1 optical drive(i wanted it 2 be small for LAN parties)
I use Inventor as well. Excellent software, especially once you figure out some of the tricks to making it do what you want!
yeah, inventor is pretty good, although I've never worked w/sheet metal b4, and its been kinda tricky...
On inventor can't you just use make the models a standard part instead of using sheet metal? or do you need to use sheet metal for milling?
yeah, theres two different ways to do it... one, you can just do it the regular way as a 3d model(which I prefer), but theres also a special sheetmetal process(which isn't too different, except for a few things).
I most have a crappy version of inventor cause my version sucks. It wont install correctly on windows XP it has license problems and i install it on 98 and it has stability problems and will crash in the middle of my design. I was stupid and spent 30 minutes working on a project and didnt save (argh) and it crashed i was MAD. If i could afford it i would get autocad in a heart beat.
Well I'm going to be cutting most of the parts tomorrow(maybe over the weekend) with a plasma CNC cutter... I'll be sure to post some pix!
well my project is on hold right now... The CNC plasma cutter I was hoping on using is broken, so I gotta wait quite awhile to get the case made. I'll post an update tho, as soon as I make some progress...
