Concept
- PCB Style front and rear panels
- Small footprint
- Can be linked physically
- Hardwood end cheeks
- 3D Printed fixings and details
- Custom connectors
3D-printed elements (where it earns its place): Control knob surrounds, legend panels/overlays, corner brackets and joiners, cable routing clips, internal standoffs and PCB mounts, decorative grilles or vented sections, and custom foot/bumper pieces. These are all shapes where the layer-line texture either doesn’t show, or gets painted/primed.
Surface finish strategies for prints: If you want smooth visible printed parts — XTC-3D epoxy coating, automotive filler primer, or resin-coating for SLA parts can get you to a surface indistinguishable from injection moulding at close range. Or lean into texture deliberately for tactile grip sections.
Joinery for panels: At that size, corner brackets work well but you might also look at aluminium extrusion (like Eurorack uses) — tap threads into the ends and the side cheeks become structural. It’s a classic look that reads as deliberately engineered.
One-off workflow: For each enclosure being a unique design, parametric modelling (Fusion 360, FreeCAD) lets you keep the joinery and internal mounts as a template and swap out the top panel geometry per unit. The printed parts can literally be generated from the same file with different parameters.
Material pairings that work well together aesthetically:
- Brushed aluminium top + dark walnut sides — classic, high-end
- Black powder-coated steel + translucent frosted acrylic side windows
- Raw CNC’d birch ply throughout, printed details in matte black PETG