This enclosure needed to have 4 exterior walls with curved edges, 2 interior lips made up of four sides with 20 holes over all four sides with brass inserts and two lips on each side to hold 2 inside shelves. They also needed to have a gap on the left- and right-hand side for our customer to fit handles to the finished enclosure. The customer also specified that none of the walls or inserts were allowed to be screwed together – it was essential that these were all welded into place to give the desired finish that the customer required.

This is a project that was going to involve many processes – firstly sourcing the two types of plastic and brass inserts to allow us to trial this. Each of the walls then needed to be cut to the exact dimensions using our CNC milling machine – using this machine enabled us to make several tool changes automatically to allow us to mill at an angle and to different depths & hole sizes as per the customer requirements.

We then had to purchase a welding machine and various large jigs. Due to the quality of finish the customer required – we had to ensure that the welding of all 16 pieces of plastic were done simultaneously – which meant clamping all 16 pieces together before starting to weld – we needed to be perfect as the inside shelves were attached to the outside walls by making plastic lips during the welding process, and to maintain overall dimensional conformity we needed to hold these in place with high accuracy.  We then ensured we were able to fit the brass inserts into the respective parts of the enclosure.

This process took several weeks and several protype enclosures being shown to the customer for testing, during the process our customer was able to comment on anything that wasn’t quite working or needed to be altered. This was then implemented on technical drawings, achieved during the cutting, milling & welding process – resulting in a finished part that was not only a high-quality finish but met each requirement that our customer needed.