I attached the .1-inch thick side and front panels with 6 stainless steel flat head socket cap screws. The front panel extends past the tops of the side panels by .10-inch in order to hide the top's front edge.
The process to attach the panels is:
Drill pilot holes along the edges of the panel
Clamp the panel to frame and use the pilot holes to drill tap holes into the frame
Remove the panel and tap the frame holes
Countersink the panel holes
The side panels extend past the top of the frame by the thickness of the hinge. These will later be scribed and cut to length along the back of the case.
I like the look of really well made homemade cases. More industrial / custom order looking. Kind of like older routers and switches, or those radio shack project enclosures. Are you planning any paint for it or anything decorative? I think bare aluminium would look pretty sleek in a way... not that you can really go wrong with a good paint job.
On the bottom of the case, a large slot was cutout which will allow fresh air to enter the front air duct. Following standard operating procedures, a router pattern/template was made at the same size as the desired opening.
The aluminum was removed with my trusty handheld router in two passes, once with a over-hanging pattern bit and another with a flush-cutting pattern bit.
Up next is fabricating a duplicate of the 120mm back fan panel, but for 140mm fans. This time I had Lazerwerx cut me a custom 140mm fan hole router template out of 3/8-inch thick cast acrylic.
This template is a snap to use: mark center lines and lay the corresponding slits cutout from the template over them.
The latches for the top are these nice "lift and turn" ones:
The latches require a fairly small area to be cutout, with only about a 2mm "lip", so I built a very accurate router template from some leftover t-slot extrusion:
During final assembly (before paint) some rework is inevitable. With this case, early on in the build, it was widened to accommodate the front radiators. But I never went back to see if the PSU mounting bracket worked/looked okay. Plus, I never tested the PSU cutout from the back sheet with the the actual PSUs used for the build. Well, the cutout in the backsheet for the PSUs had to be widened by 3mm in order to clear the fan grill on the PSU cooling fan. And the PSU mounting plate looked to dainty and needed to be widened.
And with the old PSU mounting bracket placed in front of the new one:
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