1.1 Building the Casing
In this section, you will build the acrylic casing for the OpenTempescope.
At the end of the section, you should have a beautiful box that looks like this:
There are two ways you could go about getting the pieces ready for construction:
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Laser cut them
This is probably faster, and you are likely to end up with better quality parts. You should be able to alter the CAD Schematics to be printable by the service of your choice, fairly easily. Please let me know if anyone has done this.
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Cut them by hand
This could take a lot of time, get very messy, and you may end up with non-watertight parts. However, it's also very good fun. I will be describing things in this section assuming you choose this route.
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2 acrylic boards (320mm x 550mm x 2mm) $14/piece
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1 acrylic pipe (intern-diam:4mm extern-diam:6mm length:300mm) $2/piece
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1 PVC pipe (intern-diam: 6mm length:200m) $0.5/piece
If you live in Japan, you can get all of the acrylic materials at just about any DIY store. Other countries, I'm sure you'll cope...
- acrylic cutter
- acrylic adhesive
- cutting board
- (metallic) ruler
- power drill
- files
- sand paper (#400 and #1200 are OK)
- non-abrasive acrylic cleaner
- silicon sealants
It would help to know how to handle acrylic before you start building. You should find web tutorials for:
- cutting acrylic
- filing+cleaning acrylic
- gluing acrylic
- sealing acrylic (making the joints watertight)
- drilling holes in acrylic
Here are some web links:
Once you have all of the materials ready, let's get started with preparing the parts.