Whenever you design a small project, whether it be passive, semiconductor or tube based, at some point you have to think about the enclosure it is all going to fit into. Full disclosure, my mechanical skills are poor. What used to be called "fitting" is all I can manage these days. Forget about drilling or filing holes and bending metal. I am happy to have a flat panel made by Frank Rollen, for example, and fit the controls and connectors to it but that is as far as I want to go.
The panels themselves are not the issue. The problem is finding an enclosure with the panels in the positions I want them. For some projects, a flat panel at either end of a box is fine. It worked well for the Classic Solo Project and I build all my power supplies this way and there are plenty of readily available standard enclosures of this type. However, there is a whole range of projects where what you really need is a nice flat removable panel on the top onto which you can fit the controls, and another nice flat panel at the back onto which you can fit the connectors. And it would be really nice if it came in a broad range of sizes. I have searched widely but as far as I can see this kind of enclosure does not exist so I was wondering if there is some fairly easy way of creating it? Would it be possible to make one using extrusions to make corners (similar to the way I have seen in pictures of Calrec modules) or maybe a framework could be 3D printed and have metal panels fitted to it. Bottom line, it would be nice to have a scaleable standard solution to this problem.
Cheers
Ian
