Originally Posted by
The_Doctor
TJ, I had another thought for projector building... If you get the 1/8'' thick angle section aluminium, 3/4'' wide, you could cut it to form edges to bind fairly thin plates of alumium by drilling 5mm holes and using a pop riveter, same way that flight cases are built. The heavy plate wants far better fixings, but you could build the entire top this way, and also the bottom section that contains a big slow fan for cooling. It's fast, cheap, and if you end up with nice methods for quickly making the edges from that angle section stock, you could get money for rapid prototype builds for people.
I learned this possibility when I wanted to modify a flight case to fit that tiny 1U rack computer I built. It amazed me how cheap the rivets and riveting gun were, and how easy and fast it is to get a good result. With 3mm thick aluminium sheet the result might be very strong too. Better yet, there are various flight case sheets that are composites of aluminium and wood, or black plastic. If you can get them cut by the seller, you might solve all kinds of DIY build problems and also get a very high quality result.