Assembly
This took longer than I expected. I was at it for nearly 3 hours. I think most of the time was spent cutting, preparing and soldering the mains wiring. I don’t take any chances with the mains and I wanted the wires to be soldered well and to be stress-free in their positions.
Here’s the result. It looks great to me and works just fine. I had some concerns that the pressure caused by the insertion of the power leads would stress the acrylic but there’s no noticeable flexing of the side so my choice of 5mm acrylic seems to have been a good one.
It wasn’t all plain sailing though. If you look at this photograph you’ll see a small crack at the top of the acrylic. This happened while I was pressing down the last top piece into place. The last piece is the hardest because it has to mate on all four sides and I think I was just impatient and pressed too hard. The key is to use plenty of silicone oil and ease down each side a few millimeters at a time. Thankfully the crack is at the back and does not affect the integrity of the overall case.
Let’s have a look at some of the case features.
The fan wire is routed under the board, including the high voltage section so a series of holes are provided that can be used to tie down the wire using plastic bag ties so that there’s no chance of it rising up and touching the high voltage part.
