Creating Wooden Enclosures

[Matthias] built a wooden enclosure for his keyboard. He’s used to using a Commodore 64 keyboard and decided he didn’t need the num pad found on modern keyboards.

It’s not the finished product that interests us, but the methods he used to create such a nice looking enclosure. From the wooden binary adder he produced we know he’s a talented woodworker. He takes us step-by-step through the use of a scroll saw, table saw, and router tabled to turn out this one-of-a-kind. You may not own these tools but someone you know does. Follow his example and turn out your own wooden wonders.

[Thanks Harald]

19 thoughts on “Creating Wooden Enclosures

  1. Interesting tips and nice precision, but I think it looks lousy, lacking artistic insight.
    Sorry for my frankness but it would not be nice if everybody just screamed ‘great’ to be nice either.
    Look on google images or something to get some ideas from the classics how to make look wooden objects nicer.

  2. To the guy who says it lacks artistic insight:

    Who says this was supposed to be art? I didn’t built it to please art snobs. I built it to be practical and useful. I could care less what “artists” think about it. — ok, maybe I care enough to respond :)

  3. @Whatnot it’s somehow a question of personal taste. I like wood and it reminds me of skateboards… in a way. So for me its great. And you can’t stop me from saying someone he has done a great job, too. There are so many guys out there, saying, “you could do this much better!” or “Look at them, they do better!”..

  4. Like many crafts, woodworking is the sort of thing that you really need someone to teach you I think. You can do a lot of reading and video watching but in the end having someone to demonstrate and help you out is the best option.

    I just wish there are more courses near me. I’d love to do an evening class but would have to travel ~80Km to the nearest one.

  5. @Matthias It’s bloody obvious he went through the effort as an expression of art, not to make his keyboard easier to throw on a fire.

    But sure, it’s a matter of taste, that too is obvious, and I express mine, while acknowledging the skill, I suck at woodworking, when I saw a plank in 2 the cut is never straight :/ so I know it’s not that easy, and those holes for the keyblocks would need to line up and still look tight.
    But still, it’s not beautiful as it could be theoretically.

  6. I looked at cabinet making for computers a few years ago. The required skill and cost of wood working quickly dissuaded me.

    I did however get a very good idea. Old Radios, the ‘tombstone’ types from the early 1900’s are about the same size as an ATX computer case. They can also be found cheap, and the wood usually looks good. Antiques stores are a good place to start. Make sure you don’t plug in the Radio unless you have a fire extinguisher ready. 80 year old tubes and dust don’t mix.

    The computer worked very well, except for very weird grounding issues that I could never rectify to my satisfaction. It turns out that maybe there is a reason for computers to me metal.

    There are some companies that make very high end wooden keyboards out of rare and very high quality wood. They cost a fortune, and I never wanted one that bad.

  7. PS-

    Great job on the keyboard. I know how hard it is to do that. Fit and finish, the hardest parts of it, look great.

    Congrats on a job well done on a very difficult scale to work with in wood.

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