bladamson
Veteran Member
I ganked this out of that other thread so as to not spam up that gentleman's sales attempts.
I've never seen an H8 up close, but it looks like it's the same enclosure as my H11. If that is the case, all of the bends are straight and parallel, and there doesn't appear to be any press-forming with dies or anything like that. It shouldn't be too awfully hard to manufacture a very similar case with a home-made sheet metal brake (some angle iron, a bench vise, several vice-grips, an angle level, and a piece of pipe for a handle, basically). The hardest part would probably be the folded over lips at the front edges where the top goes on. Hmmmm. Doable though I think, although it may take better clamping action than you could get with vice-grips. Might have to make something that went on that edge and drew down tightly across there with several bolts or something......
I guess the sides are some kind of routed out particle board with a plastic coating on the outside? I bet there is some kind of coating you could put on plywood and then sand to get the same effect. All I know is it looked like white plastic under the paint on the sides where my H11 was scratched up before I touched it up.
The holes in the back would be troublesome without some punch dies, but I bet something could be ginned up where you cut a rough hole in the back with a sabre saw or something, and then had some kind of 3d-printed bezel that snapped in to make it all pretty and such.
My redneck fabricobbling "skills" don't extend much past "good enough for farm work" though. Any of you gentlemen have any wisdom to add to this harebrained thought?
Basically this hackaday article, and the site that it links to: https://hackaday.com/2021/10/27/vcf-east-2021-preserving-heathkits-8-bit-computers/ . Someone has cloned most of the boards necessary to build an H8.
I could build the whole thing from scratch, and a few people have, but the cabinet for the H8 has an iconic look and feel to it. I've been keeping an eye out for someone who either has a cabinet, or an H8 in disrepair, or one that's complete but cheap (in that case I'd either use or save the original boards).
Every so often I get a wild idea to grab a vintage computer I don't already have and start making new pcboards for it. Undoubtedly I'd end up making an H8 speech synthesizer.
Scott
I've never seen an H8 up close, but it looks like it's the same enclosure as my H11. If that is the case, all of the bends are straight and parallel, and there doesn't appear to be any press-forming with dies or anything like that. It shouldn't be too awfully hard to manufacture a very similar case with a home-made sheet metal brake (some angle iron, a bench vise, several vice-grips, an angle level, and a piece of pipe for a handle, basically). The hardest part would probably be the folded over lips at the front edges where the top goes on. Hmmmm. Doable though I think, although it may take better clamping action than you could get with vice-grips. Might have to make something that went on that edge and drew down tightly across there with several bolts or something......
I guess the sides are some kind of routed out particle board with a plastic coating on the outside? I bet there is some kind of coating you could put on plywood and then sand to get the same effect. All I know is it looked like white plastic under the paint on the sides where my H11 was scratched up before I touched it up.
The holes in the back would be troublesome without some punch dies, but I bet something could be ginned up where you cut a rough hole in the back with a sabre saw or something, and then had some kind of 3d-printed bezel that snapped in to make it all pretty and such.
My redneck fabricobbling "skills" don't extend much past "good enough for farm work" though. Any of you gentlemen have any wisdom to add to this harebrained thought?