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[Spotswood]

Another requirement for this case is a hidden door latching mechanism.

Look Ma!  No latches!




A length of .125x.75-inch flat bar was bolted to the bottom of the door to act as a lip that will hook into the u-channel along the bottom of the case, for example:




Along the top of the door, there is a piece of angle with three "hooks", which were routed out using a cobbled together router template. 






A thick piece of flat bar was filed down to where it'll slide easily inside the u-channel along the top of the case.  To that three "posts" were bolted to it.  When slid forward, the posts will engage the hooks.

[Spotswood]

A large area of the right side panel was cutout for a 16x15-inch acrylic window.

[Spotswood]

I made a mistake, placing the false back too far into the case, which required having to re-fabricate the back sheet.  But I figured I could take advantage of the situation by improving the mounting of the motherboard tray, by fastening the tray to the false back with a 7/8-inch long spacer.



I don't remember if I already offered this tip before, but I try to reduce the wear and tear on my 1/2-inch flush cutting router bit by first rough cutting with a 3/16-inch spiral downward cutting bit.

[Spotswood]

A PSU mounting plate was routed out of a piece .10-inch thick aluminum sheet with the help of a custom template.

In order to accurately transfer the locations of the PSU mounting holes, threaded hole transfer punches (mcmaster.com part #    3385A31) were threaded into a PSU.






And then the PSU was carefully centered and pressed into the sheeting, with the end result being a perfect squarely mounted PSU.

[Spotswood]

Another router template was made to cutout the areas for the PSUs out of the back sheet.  A guide was clamped to the bottom of the template to keep the cutouts perfectly aligned along the bottom.

[Spotswood]

Turned out that I needed to cut one more slot out of the bottom shelf. But the last time I used my wooden "small slot" router template, I somehow managed to crush one edge, so I quickly cobbled together a new out of some left over t-slot extrusion.  I'm really loving using these t-slot extrusions to make router templates - fast and accurate!




Here's a teeth-shattering video of me cutting out the slot.

[Spotswood]

Performed the mind-numbing task of fastening the bottom and top sheets to the case frame via flat head socket cap screws.  Through and countersink holes were drilled into the sheet and transferred to the case frame via a self-centering counterbore drill bit.







Bottom sheet all fastened:




And top sheet all drilled out:

[Spotswood]

Drilled out the holes for the vandal resistant switches and fastened the front sheeting to the case.

[Spotswood]

Finished the lower portion of the back sheet, which involved installing the PEM nuts, trimming the PSU mounting plates to the final size and creating an extra solid cover plate (which I almost forgot to do).

[Spotswood]

In order to ensure that the flat head bolts in the top sheet would sit perfectly straight and flush, I drilled slightly over-size through holes in the top u-channel so a hex nut could go onto the ends of the bolts.  But those nuts were now in the way of the sliding bar used to latch the side panels.  A fix for that was to mill-out those areas from underneath the sliding bar (via my handheld router).



The mill marks were quickly removed with some hand filing.



To prevent the sliding bar from falling out of the u-channel, some small pieces of aluminum angle were cut and attached to the channel.



But now the angles interfered with the latching hooks on the side panel, so those areas also had to be milled away (via a center-cutting mill on the drill press).





Finally, one leg of the angle that was used to make the latching hooks was visible through the side panel perforated aluminum, so that too required having to remove around 1/4-inch of material (via my trusty router).