Hello, I want to make three 40x12x18 cm boxes with lids plus several other casing type components out of plastic that is sturdy and high quality (it's for an interior design piece). It would be best if the plastic can be colored, specifically light grey-beige like the original color on retro 80s tech before it yellowed to oblivion.
I know nothing about plastics so I have no idea whether injection, vacuum forming or 3d printing or any other production would be adequate for such a low volume (basically the prototype pieces plus one/two sets of finished pieces unless the design takes off when I show it around). It's important that the final pieces are as high quality as possible.
picrel is the color I'm going for
Mock up what you want and start calling local manufacturing. You’ll get a lot of rejections and referrals. You’ll get a range of quote from high to obscene. At that point come back here to get feedback on those options.
Also please include your budget
I have exact 3D models including all the detailing in Fusion360 and made some cardboard mockups to check if everything looks right irl. I was planning on calling around tomorrow.
Budget to start with is 500$ for the prototypes (two box variants, four casing variants) but since I want to know whether I like the plastic feel/texture and whether it gets the details right I will focus on only one of the box types. It's basically a storage unit that sits on a desk and gets touched a lot but not moved around.
Do you have any idea what plastic I need for this kind of application?
You are off by a factor of 10-100 on what this will cost ( or manhours ) to get a good result.
Does it need to be plastic, or can you fab metal or wood, and then recreate the plastic texture on top?
Can you post a render so we can see the actual product?
It doesn't need to be plastic, I just assumed metal would cost an exorbitant amount of money
Here's some renders, it's missing cable holes and some detailing isn't finalized (hinge attachment points on the box body) but the important outside details are visible. It has to have a flare out at the bottom so when it's set into the desk top (middle two pics) it looks like it's coming out of it instead of placed on top of it. That's a 2mm radius fillet on the flare out and a 1mm fillet on all outside edges (it can be bigger, but past like 3mm it starts looking like a toy and loses its industrial feel, at least in the renders), as well as a lip on the inside of the access hole for the lid to rest on. It's asymmetrical as in it doesn't have the bottom flare on the left side as it would be placed next to mirror version of itself, making two 42cm boxes for a total of 84 cm and any edge divergences or height differences become noticeable when you have straight lines that long.
I'm planning on putting leather on the bottom and lining the sides with felt or something of that nature so I don't care about the interior finish too much.
Given these shapes, I would definitely recommend FDM printing. You can get that done relatively cheaply and accurately. If the bottom plate (black in your render) can be separated from the rest, you could print the entire thing (barring the door and door mechanism arms) in one piece upside down with supports for the overhang. Probably take a few days of continuous printing, but material costs would be quite reasonable.
what about these? They're longer at 75cm each and are more intricate. I'm going to call some printing shops today and get quotes on the box
>If the bottom plate (black in your render) can be separated from the rest
it would even benefit installation if they can be disassembled like that so I might work it into the design
I like the “tab” design you are using here, but it’s much more a late 90s look. If you made the top cover look more like this, it would read as vintage a lot better.
Making these with of traditional plastic manufacturing is going to be expensive simply because you'll have to put in an obscene amount of money to make the die for it to be injection molded. I agree with what the other anon said- a larger scale industrial FDM printer can do these easily but obviously things like surface texture will be impossible on those. The problem with FDM printing even at industrial scales is parts have that "Obviously 3d printed" look.
>uniform-thickness sheets
consider using sheet metal, then perhaps 3D printing features like handles
you can paint/texture the metal to give you that plastic case look and feel, many older computer cases did just that, with the main body being all metal, and only the front face being plastic, with the metal given the same colour and texture so they blend together
i can't imagine having relatively small and thin sheet parts cut and bent would be terribly expensive, though i only draw sheet metal parts for commercial production
>i can't imagine having relatively small and thin sheet parts cut and bent
I wanted to create a cover for a custom pre-amp, I found a small local shop that was happy to make the bends for me. $20 or something.
I might build the supports out of wood, and just do the large flat pieces, and the cutouts, out of metal. I don't know - I guess it depends on how much some of those little details will cost to get done. I'm thinking of the base and bevel.
For me personally, getting the door to fit perfectly into setting would be very hard for me to do (well) with wood.
If you are trying to emulate a 90s / 80s design aesthetic, I don’t think you are nailing it. It’s a nice looking cabinet for simple wood. If you are going to invest so much into the texture and material, I’d go back to your reference material and take another look. Most of those old,PCs were metal bases anyway that was just painted to match. Only the front would have that plastic shit.
Not trying to shit on your vision, but if you want it to “read” as vintage 80s I don’t feel your current design does. If you post some of your reference material I can try and offer some suggestions.
>if you want it to “read” as vintage 80s
I don't, I am using the 80s/90s look as a basis to make a retrofuturistic desk design for myself and the box is just fine as it is because it's a module (as you said in the other reply) that fits with other pieces I have not shared here.
those casings with the tabs go around a monitor to make a 'hood', I'm not concerned with sticking with either a 70s or 80s or 90s inspiration specifically even though they were plenty different, I am taking what I like from them and using it to make a desk that would not be out of place as a background prop in a cyberpunk setting
I am aware of the design philosophies which made retro tech look like that, I am incorporating some of them into my philosophy like using modular parts (edgebox-box-monitorstand-box is the order in which the elements appear asymmetrically on the desk) and another design element which came about out of necessity is that parts of the electronics were monotask, something we avoid nowadays and something I am bringing back for *some* things in this design
For those who are curious, monotask elements would be buttons on your car dashboard dedicated to doing only one thing like controlling volume or the power of the AC. Screens and multifunction control systems make these obsolete in a lot of cases, but there are some things which should remain monotask (in cars it affects safety as well)
Fair enough. I’d definitely go with metal or metal for panels and wood for support. You can apply plastic texture afterwards. Paying someone to cut metal is cheaper and more precise. Unless you are experienced with building cabinets out of wood, it just won’t look right. good luck and post results as you go!
delving into metal it is, anons, thanks
oh, and I will be posting results along the way, though this project might take months
I would make them out of plywood with wood for the bottom molding, then laminate with some plastic
is there anything tricky about laminating wood with plastic that would require expensive equipment or years of training?
Prep the wood with sanding, and use a spray adheasive or some kind of contact cement.
Mate for parts like these, I'd recommend you learn sheet metal and go that route. You're basically making enclosures, and there's a good reason many enclosures (look up e.g. Hammond Mfg) are sheet metal.
If you redesign the tab at what looks like 20deg in this part
, it could be done by laser-cutting + bending mild steel, and would probably come out to ~$500 for one piece without shipping, no MOQ. Check out SendCutSend.
Finishing is easy, you can buy paints with any color and texture you could possibly want, even roughened plastic.
I don't mind putting in the manhours, I'm just too poor for most industrial production options. If the desk ends up looking nice, though, I'll consider making a couple more to sell and become slightly less poor.
With a batch size of 3, I would personally just hand-make them. Having them professionally manufactured would be incredibly expensive. You may be able to get reasonable results with FDM 3d prints glued together, but it's not exactly a "hit print and walk away for 86 hours" type deal at that size. There are a lot of methods you could use to make them by hand, I would suggest maybe starting with paper mockups of the parts (the inside faces), then layering over them with fiberglass fabric and epoxy resin. When near final thickness, bondo over everything then sand it down for a uniform surface. Let fully cure, then gently bead-blast the texture on. This is a LOT of work, but you have complete control over the end result. If you 3D print it in smaller pieces and then glue together, you can skip the paper/fiberglass bit and just do the bondo-texture-finish stuff. 3D printing will give you greater accuracy in case you have details like latches, or the parts fit together precisely.
If you were injection molding, such as would be done with production parts and a 90 million dollar budget, you would use ABS pellets as your feed stock. Plastic parts thicker than approx 2mm would not be vacuum formed. The classic beige plastic look of the 90s was usually just white (or in some cases "natural" AKA undyed) ABS that had some yellowing already.
They have to be precise because there's a lot of parts that line up even across the different boxes as they will be slotted next to each other in the final product, so I guess I'll go with 3d printing and applying bondo or some other body kit on top. I've never worked with kits, can I achieve milimiter accuracy with gaps and some other small details?
As for 3d printing, aren't there options that could print one of my elements whole and with a good surface finish thati could then work on, something like SLS or LCD?
>I've never worked with kits, can I achieve milimiter accuracy with gaps and some other small details?
Bondo/wood/body filler is just a uniform sandable material. If you can sand it gently enough, you can probably get quarter-millimeter accuracy.
>As for 3d printing, aren't there options that could print one of my elements whole and with a good surface finish thati could then work on, something like SLS or LCD?
There are, but for parts that size it would cost several thousand dollars per print, and you need three of them. Home SLA printers have much smaller build volumes, and SLA in general is two things: hard to work to precise dimensions, and fricking expensive in terms of material costs. Assuming you had access to an industrial SLA machine (necessary to fit your parts in one piece), it would still likely take longer to get it all dialed in and accounted for shinkage and supports, than it would to simply FDM print the parts and refine with bondo and sanding.
Since you already have the models just 3d print them. if they're too big for a printer then divide it into sections and glue them together. This is just for the prototype though, you'll have to redesign the models to suit injection molding (draft angle) if you go beyond a prototype.
Let’s compare some things. I’m using picrel as reference. Early PCs we’re trying to walk this line between serious expensive testing equipment, and something you would have in your house. So they start with the hard practical boxes of testing gear, and then added curves as best they could.
If you are stacking things - they shouldn’t try and blur into one piece. The 80s was about modular shit. The monitor in this case is attached, but most monitors had a soft round endive on the bottom, visually separating them from the computer below. Even in this case you can see the artificial lines they have added to make it look modular.
You can see in this time period designers trying to get away from the square shapes that were dictated by the function - square screens. This became painfully obvious in the 90s hen they would take a square metal box and just stick some rounded plastic piece on the front.
These pet computers wanted badly to be like pyramids.
real commercial quality cases like your picture are usually done by machining a metal cast and injecting plastic into them
the main cost is making the cast, so it's very expensive to make only a few this way
for making only a few, 3D printing then fixing them up by hand for surface finish and small features would be cheaper
>>look veeniring on YouTube
"Veneering". ESL.