Today I did a quick lasercut test of the inner supports. The idea was to check whether the real-life parts actually fit inside.

As you can see on the picture above, it was pretty much perfect right off the bat. Fits like a glove :-). I just needed to make some minor modifications here and there. For one the tablet cutout didn’t exactly fit the actual profile of the back of the tablet. So that needed to be adapted slightly, next to some other aesthetical changes. But I got in the zone and I ended up doing a major redesign of the whole support structure. I decided to add crossbeams in order to make the whole thing structurally more solid. Especially where the ‘bends’ will occur I felt I needed reinforcement. Not only that, but now the inner skeleton will support itself and piece together like a puzzle. Before I would have had to eyeball the placement of the supports, now everything just clicks into place. It seems like a small addition, and it probably is to people experienced in 3D CAD software, but it literally took me hours to boolean subtract all the notches and get it exactly the way I want it.

This will be final, I’m fed up and done with the CAD part.

The profiles look as such:

6 support beams and 2 of each of the profiles. They will be lasercut in 3mm plywood (for a moment, i contemplated using balsa, but in the end I think plywood will be stronger. Especially where the emergency stop will be located I need the supports to be able to handle a stomp or two), but in the drawings I actually use 3.2mm everywhere because 3mm plywood usually is slightly thicker in reality. Whatever the case, it will piece together more easily because of this added tolerance. For the same reason (I don’t want to be sanding off the backs of the beams to get them flush) I also added a 0.2mm clearance inside the finger joints as such:

So the final design of the support skeleton is this:

Pretty neat huh.