DeltaFlightcase

Projects
Participants	Ultratux
Skills	Woodworking, measurements, painting
Status	Finished
Niche	Mechanics
Purpose	Use in other project

Building a proper flightcase for a Cerberus-derived delta 3D printer. It ought to be flexible enough to house both the newer -printed- model and the original model in ways that even rough treatment will likely be survived gloriously.

Challenges:

• Find ways to keep weight limited so it can still be carried by a single person. Used 9mm plywood. Strong and light.
• Determine how to best design inside of case to accommodate the different variations of the cerberus.
• Find some way to cut foam into arbitrary shapes A sharp knife works wonders; No need for a hot wire cutter at all.
• Find affordable sources for support foam and 'hang en sluitwerk' plus wheels. Ordered at zelfbouwcase.nl, very happy with 'em.

Due date: no later than December 19th, 2014

Challenges met:

• Cheap non-birch 9 mm plywood; good compromise between price, sturdyness and weight.
• Found wheels and butterfly-lock-thingies in my attic.
• Ordered pre-cut 'hard foam' at zelfbouwcase.nl, so possibly avoided cutting it myself. Make calculation mistakes so had to cut it. But it's easy.
• Protection will basically be just a tight fit inside between 20mm hard foam plates and some strategically placed additional hard-foam buffer blocks.

Progress:

• All materials ordered and received, just need to move foam plates to TI by bike.
• Bottom half of case made, glued. Next up is painting. Only after painting can wheels etc be mounted.
• Top half is under way. It bends a bit too much, so it may need slight redoing or adjustment.
• Bought/ordered a pneumatic rivet gun; mounting 80x 5mm rivets with the cheapest possible Gamma manual rivet gun is quite hard and painful work...

Lessons learned:

• If you need to mount metal corners and wheels, NEVER mount the wheels first; they'll end up in the spot where the corners needed to go!
• Never glue the hard foam on the inside before drilling all the necessary holes for the rivets; the drill might catch on the foam, even if unlikely.
• A pneumatic rivet gun is AWESOME! If not for the ease of work, then just for the sound it makes while using it <3
• Hard foam is completely different from soft foam; the former is actually VERY easy to cut with a sharp knife. Contrary to popular belief.

Postscript/Addendum

• I found out, belatedly, that the glass bed sticks out more than 2 cm which is the thickness of the bottom foam. So the gap I cut isn't quite enough. To address this I cut and glued four ~8mm thick pads underneath the four supports. I hope this helps enough.
• Seeking good ways to fix/hold stuff (like accessories, power supplies, etc.) in place inside the case I fancied using flexible rope/cord. But how to fix it, if having a number of knots outside the case is a NO-NO? I got my eureka moment when I thought of pulling the rope though a 5mm hole, putting a rivet there, and cutting the rope off making it invisible from the outside (just seeing the rivet). It seems to work like a charm.
• Using this trick and others, the case now has supports and fixations to safely carry: the PSU, a 14" laptop, the laptops PSU, and a bunch of cables and/or power bars etc. Also: 3x spare diagonal rods. I'm still looking into more of these storage locations, but the lack of suitable foam, foam-glue and time limits me somewhat. So that might just be for 2015.