I'm a Save The Best For Last kind of guy so in my perfect world I'd be showing
you guys the coolest Parts at the end of
the video like the laser cutter but I
want this video to be sort of a start to finish journey of the of the birth of
the new case for my personal rig so we're going to go completely in order
all the way through the bending and and the and the cutting until we arrive here
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the link in the video description to try it for free all right so this machine
you're looking at right now is a 2.5 kilowatt yes that is
2,500 Watts carbon dioxide laser worth
about a million Canadian rupes it concentrates all of that power on a spot
about 7 1,000 of an inch in diameter
giving it an energy density greater than the Sun and allowing it to vaporize up
to 200 in per minute of 20 gauge cold
rolled steel as you watch the laser start a new cut you'll see an initial
flash where the plasma goes flying up as the beam hits the top of the metal then
you'll see Sparks on the bottom from the inert syst gas uh protocase actually
makes their own on site with a nitrogen generator blowing it down towards the
grate which holds the metal in place during The Cutting process so the
machine you're looking at right now is purely digitally controlled and has been
running about 18 hours a day since 2008
with only about 5 days of
downtime the next stage is deing for
small parts that would otherwise fall through the grate and get lost in the
cutter there's little tabs to hold hold them in place that need to be manually
removed but all of the parts do actually
get deburred anyway because while in a perfect world little bits of melted
metal would not cling to the finished Parts because the laser has to slow down
going into the corners of a cut power needs to be dropped appropriately or the
size of the cut will change and CO2 lasers don't respond as fast as the
machine needs to move so power control on the corners is imperfect so for that
reason two sets of rotary brushes are used first a high abrasion one to
eliminate what they call Dragon's Teeth and slag with a less aggressive one to
round the extremely sharp Corners that
would otherwise slice up your hands fun fact the two sets of brushes that are
used oscillate back and forth by at least one brush radius this ensures that
every Edge is hit equally from all sides and gives the bare metal a uniform
finish for applications where it won't be painted next is counter syncing where
our very small project was run on a drill press with a spring loaded depth
stop device to ensure that all the screws are perfectly flush but for
larger projects there's actually a CNC router table that does this
automatically next is the part where we all do the
Bender do the Bender do oh I fell off my
box anyway um anyway no actually this is the part where the metal gets bent
protocase performs their bends on a press brake with a punch and die system
that's designed for air bending where the punch the ground hardened steel
piece that uh is made to be accurate within about a couple thousandths of an
inch pushes the metal down into the D
but leaves an air gap under it this technique combined with the accuracy of
the controls being used so the one you're looking at is a CNC controlled 60
ton press and extensive computer simulation of metal bending to
compensate for spring back and Metal's propensity to stretch better than it
compresses allows air bending to be very versatile and accurate without the same
operator skill requirement as bottom bending where the punch bottoms out into
the bottom of the die at the next stage
pems or self-clinching Fasteners if
you're one of those people that actually calls things selfadhesive bandage or
facial tissue instead of Band-Aid or Kleenex and these are standoff stands
and nuts that are inserted by a press that applies six tons of force to
permanently fasten them to the metal fun fact the Press doesn't apply its Force
until it's about a fingernails width from the workpiece to prevent operators
from crushing their fingers when it comes to welding there is no single way
to do it but protocase uses gear from an Australian company called fronius that
helps to alleviate some of the issues with using more traditional Mig and TIG
welding techniques like the tendency for examp example of thin sheet metal to get
wavy or even knelt back from the attempted join leaving two ugly pieces
of metal and a gap in between instead of a joint it actually Bears a lot of
similarity to mig welding where a spool of wire is being constantly fed towards
the join filling much the same role as solder would in soldering except that
the difference with pronia's technique is that thanks to digital control of
power and the spool feed rate the filler metal is actually repeatedly heated and
applied 20 to 30 times per second rather than constantly this results in cleaner
work lower power consumption and less heat being applied to the workpiece so
with this Tech instead of being limited to working with 16 gauge aluminum or
higher you can go all the way down to about the thickness of a pop can the
only drawback is that machines from fronius cost about 10 times there's
always a gotcha isn't there router Milling is used in
situation tion where the design work is too fine to handle the heat of a laser
so the setup you're looking at is a 5x 10t table with a CNC controlled cutter
very similar to a drill bit that can be controlled to within about a thousandth
of an inch the coolest thing about this Dad is the automatic tool changer so
more of the process is automated even if it has to make a lot of different kinds
of cuts then with all the parts bent and
cut it is finally time for painting
almost rookie mistake number one with any paint job is poor preparation so the
entire project gets cleaned and degased
etched with a phosphate to roughen the surface for better adhesion and in the
case of Steel coated with a light touch of zirconium for corrosion resistance
after that all the little screw threads and anything else that would be damaged
or resized out of Tolerance by getting gunked up with paint gets plugged heat
resistant masking tape is used for any areas that need to stay bare metal and
then the finished parts are hung up on electrically conductive hooks where the
powder coating powder clings to them due to static electricity yet another fun
fact the nozzle of the powder coat applicator is charged at 100,000 volts
to make the powder really cling to the parts so you can actually build up
multiple layers of material before they're finally rolled into an oven and
baked which leads us to the final stage
assembly where the computer drawings are turned into a real life object that if
all goes according to plan somewhat corresponds to the original computer
drawing and from first inspection I'd say this went pretty darn well I can't
wait to put my liquid cooled system into this truly one-of-a-kind rack mount case
so huge thanks to protocase for building it for me it is really amazing what
those guys can do with custom metal fabrication speaking of amazing what if
there was a desk that could be lower and
then hire oh there is right upd desk.com
the providers of the desks that we use here in our editing Den benchmarking
room and in my office they're fantastic because not only do they allow any
individual user to get it customized to exactly the right height for their their
best Comfort while they're working they are also quickly and easily adjustable
so you can go okay I want to be sitting right now oh you know what I'd rather
kind of stretch out my back a little bit and St work standing up for a little
while no problem they've got presets so all you do is hold the button and boom
it goes to exactly the setting that you set with the preset they've got a
variety of different tabletops everything from corner desks to large
straight desks to well smaller straight desks they've got a lot of different
surface coverings that they can do and a little bird told me that if you contact
them directly they can even work on custom sizes of tabletops as well so
check it out over at upd desk.com Linus Linked In the video description if
you've been thinking to yourself gee I sure would like a standing desk one
that's wellb built high quality and all that good stuff so thanks for watching
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