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I wonder if a 'machined from solid' housing would be economical to produce. It would use screws for assembly and re-assembly, would have to be plastic or aluminum and have insulating material in certain places. It should be close to the original size but stronger and made to be taken apart.

Transfering the face plate may be the most challenging part, not bending it during removal...

Rubber feet, battery compartments, ir ports... oh my!

Making them would be the easy part, engineering the design and transfering the components may be the real issues.

Have I had too much turkey leftovers?

What model to look at first?

I suppose that an outer shell that screwed together around the existing case may be functional to hold it together, but it would be too clunky.

Any thoughts?

Jeff

I suppose the models that most often need to be opened and are difficult to repair the housing on would have the most need. If it covered many models it would have a better chance of actually being produced.

The 49G+ would have been a better machine if it could allow overlays to be used as with the 48 series.

That sounds like "pioneer" -- some of them develop keyboard problems that require the calculator to be opened to fix. They're very hard to open and even harder to reassemble, and they cover an interesting range of models.

I have a friend who does custom jewelry, etc. She had made solid gold/silver/platinum / jewel encrusted, etc cases for cell phones, PDA's, etc. If you don't have 5-6 digits buring a hole in your wallet don't bother calling though. Also she is booked years in advance.

Does anybody know if the same housing would work for all or most of the pioneers?

Machining an enclosure from a solid block of material is one of the more expensive ways to go, even if there were no tooling costs to speak of. The real problem is that so much material is wasted in the process. There are benefits to such an approach, such as improved strength properties. Since we're talking about calculators and not engine blocks, I think it would be overkill.

Let's look at some more practical options: Vacuum/pressure forming, die casting, and injection molding. Vacuum/pressure forming is by far the most economical choice for the kind of enclosures we're discussing. Tooling is dirt cheap (only in the thousands) and it works very well for small runs between 1 and 50-100,000 units. At that point injection molding is a better option. Die casting is more or less metal's answer to injection molding.

I've spent a good deal of time looking into manufacturing enclosures for the OpenRPN project. After going through many options and quotes it looks as though we will be going with injection molding (possibly an ABS/PC blend). The dimensions of our machines will be the same as the voyagers and pioneers and all of the holes for keys, LCD, etc. are going to be laser cut. So if the innards of voyagers and pioneers can be retrofitted I see it as a win-win situation.

PPU of the enclosures will be in the neighborhood of $10US. If there is any interest in this idea I can post some renderings of the plain enclosures.

Jeff, feel free to send me an e-mail if you have any other questions about this topic. I'd be happy to help.

Best Regards,
Hugh Evans

Perhaps this is the new direction HP seems to be looking for. Add a bit more of the bling-bling factor to their machines. 24K gold plated, iced out, gemstone shift keys... Oh, and it should play mp3s too!

No gold plating here... they be solid gold. Real bling rocks too.