Clear top for hard disk

edit: :lol:

maceffects said:

I still need to engineer the the hard drive cover to make that happen. I think it would be so cool to be able to see the drive in action, especially the Mini Scribe stepper motors. 

Click to expand...

Might I suggest a Quantum leap for a much more demonstrative approach to your Clear SE/30/Visible HDD notion?



I've been planning (for almost twenty years!) to use the sheet metal as a vacuum forming buck, but if you model it and shave off the thickness of the clear material you could have a perfectly smooth vacuum forming buck done on the prototyping rig and go into production without need of injection mold tooling. ;-)

No need to bother with the the bonded flat cover on the stamping(?) as artistic interpretation would be very cool. There's probably enough room underneath the front portion of the drive for SCSI2SD. If not, or in any event you should figure on doing a "clear" printed, solvent fume smoothed HDD carrier, the stock sheet metal is FUGLY and blocks too much of the view of the insides.  [}]

Trash80toHP_Mini said:

Might I suggest going Quantum for a much more demonstrative approach to your Clear SE/30/Visible HDD notion?

View attachment 27568

I've been planning (for almost twenty years!) to use the sheet metal as a vacuum forming buck, but if you model it and shave off the thickness of the clear material you could have a perfectly smooth vacuum forming buck done on the prototyping rig and go into production production without any need for injection mold tooling. ;-)

No need to bother with the the bonded flat cover on the stamping(?) as artistic interpretation would be very cool. There's probably enough room underneath the front portion of the drive for SCSI2SD. If not, or in any event you should figure on doing a "clear" printed, solvent fume smoothed HDD carrier, the stock sheet metal is FUGLY and blocks too much of the view of the insides.  [}]

Click to expand...

@Trash80toHP_Mini That type of drive top wouldn't be possible to laser cut, but other options might be possible.  I was thinking the MiniScribe drives would be super easy to model, cut, and install.   

@PotatoFi Sorry about the thread hijacking!  Sometimes, I get a bit carried away with projects.  We sent our chat to PM already.  If you do decide you need an HD SC to model, please let me know and I'll make sure that happens for you.  

As I said, vacuum forming is the way to do it. Laser cutting a flat lid is easily done, but won't give a side view of layered platters and heads going at it. Flat top lid won't let in much ambient illumination.

If supplies of working SCSI drives of this type run out, so long as they can spin and seek piggybacking off the SCSI2SD signal activity w/o a SCSI ID you're still good to go. Heck, you could even use IDE drives hoodwinked into seeking behavior. A tiny controller board for doing either while vacating cubic for the SCSI2SD underneath could be easy enough.

I'll be quiet now, I liked the IP. :approve:

/tangent

@maceffects @Trash80toHP_Mini Not possible with laser cutter, but certainly possible with CNC.  1" or 1 1/2" maybe?  Thick, small piece of plastic.  Just mill it out.

Perhaps even better, cheaper, and more practical would be to vacuum form it.  Assuming the lid is the same on the inside as it is on the outside, of course.

Edit:  Trash already made the vacuum form suggestion.

This  .  .  .



.  .  .  or this?



I rest my case. I'm back off tangent again. :lol:

edit: maybe not quite yet: forgot the NIC and backplane frame which doesn't quite fit in straight.



Lots of room for that doohickey and its loopback cable. Lil' Quantum Boy in the Plastic Bubble really rocks it for me.  :approve:

@Cory5412  can branch the tangent off into its own thread I think? He's done so before. Nice diagram! :approve:

Split from 



In the future, it would be best if when you have this kind of idea, you created a new thread and referred back to the thread that gave you the idea, if relevant.

In the future it would be best for you to determine the context of a suggestion that you branch something off into a new topic. You missed the 11 posts leading up to my first one above, which was made within minutes of PototatoFi saying "Some quality thread highjacking happening right here!" At which point I immediately appended the LOL! emoticon in an edit and tried to steer things back on topic. As I said, I was interested in the IP.

Not my tangent, not my idea to do a clear lid in that thread and your commentary above was more than a bit rude.

You can still correct course once you realize what happened.

If you prefer that somebody other than me does these thread splits for you, you can also use the generic post reporting functions so that it gets in front of the eyes of the other three admins/moderators.

Notably, these splits are tedious and always difficult to get done 100% correctly, especially given the number of  posts in the SC case thread that can be construed as either 1) a separate discussion thread dedicated to Ethernet faceplates 2) related to this clear top issue. There's also the issue that not all posts after a certain point are relevant to the spun-out discussion topic.

I do these when I can (notably, here, it took a few days to get done because I've been in the hospital for over a week) as a courtesy to people who asked nicely, to keep project threads tidy and filled with relevant information. If this is what your response to receiving this assistance will be, I'll make a policy of not responding to these requests, especially ones made by tagging me directly in-band.

Sorry to hear you''re not doing well. I wish you a speedy recovery. I apologize for getting a bit testy last night. maceffects first requested the split, even suggesting the title.  I tagged it to you for assistance and much appreciate what you do, which is why I tagged it to you.

I've got no problem with killing this thread entirely. I illustrated my suggestion and all interested got the point. maceffects can easily start his own thread for this very cool project.

Sorry for my late response.  I'm not sure where the issue originated but please accept my apologies if I have done anything wrong.  I really felt that the platter cover was so highly related to the hard drive case (being able to see through both!) that I thought it belonged there.  Then the OP seemed upset so I wanted to avoid clogging his post with something he didn't want.  No offense intended.  We all have the same goals, to make great things happen