Drilling and customizing enclosures - tips please

You have to decide on the thickness before cutting the punch. The stamping machine I used can punch upto 0.5mm. Steel will wear out the punch faster than aluminium, but we will not reach the life time any time soon. If you want thicker materials or bigger panels, you have to go with bigger stamping machine. How thick do you want?

Reply to
linnix
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For a 3"x2"x1" enclosure with holes, let assume it's 20" linear length. Using 1mm (0.038") aluminum, it would take 30,000 lbs or 15 tons to stamp. I would be on the safe side and go with a 50 tons hydraulic press.

We rented a room size hydraulic press for a couple of days, although the actual stamping takes a couple of hours. We just bring over the punch and materials for them to stamp.

Hard tooling is better and cheaper for anything over 100 pieces. For two thousand pieces, we spent about $400 for tooling and $300 for stamping.

Reply to
linnix

On 2005-09-04, Richard Owlett wrote: [...]

I think you probably mean "Bud Box", named after the manufacturer, Bud Industries, Inc. They're still sold through most electronics supply houses. For low-volume orders, digikey.com and mouser.com are probably your best bets. You probably want one of their "mini boxes", but they have quite an extensive line of metal (sheet, extruded, and cast) and plastic enclosures to choose from. The sheet aluminum boxes (which is what the mini boxes are) are pretty easy to make holes and cutouts in. (Of course, you can also build your own pretty easily from plain sheet aluminum if you have the tools.)

As others have said, if you're making 10-20 of them, you should look into finding a local metal shop to make them for you, if you want professional results. It might be cheaper than you think.

Reply to
Randall Nortman

I think "Bug Boxes" were little compartmentalized plastic cases for storing DIP IC's.

That's probably what you were thinking of.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

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