Way back in 2008, Apple unveiled the first unibody Macbook with a chassis milled out of a single block of aluminum. Before that, essentially all laptops, including those from Apple, were flimsy plastic screwed together haphazardly on various frames. The unibody construction, on the other hand, finally showed that it was possible to make laptops that were both lightweight and sturdy. Apple eventually began producing iPhones with this same design style, and with the right tools and a very accurate set of calipers it’s possible to not only piece together the required hardware to build an iPhone from the ground up but also build a custom chassis for it entirely out of metal as well.
The first part of the project that [Scotty] from [Strange Parts] needed to tackle was actually getting measurements of the internals. Calipers were not getting the entire job done so he used a flatbed scanner to take an image of the case, then milled off a layer and repeated the scan. From there he could start testing out his design. After an uncountable number of prototypes, going back to the CAD model and then back to the mill, he eventually settles into a design but not before breaking an iPhone’s worth of bits along the way. Particularly difficult are the recessed areas inside the phone, but eventually he’s able to get those hollowed out, all the screw holes tapped, and then all the parts needed to get a working iPhone set up inside this case.
[Scotty] has garnered some fame not just for his incredible skills at the precision mill, but by demonstrating in incredible detail how smartphones can be user-serviceable or even built from scratch. They certainly require more finesse than assembling an ATX desktop and can require some more specialized tools, but in the end they’re computers like any other. For the most part.
So much custom work holding.
Solid aluminum must make a pretty good Faraday cage…
“You’re holding it wrong.”
I didn’t see how he finishes it. Anodize? Alodine? Clearcoat? Paint? It’s going to look like crap soon without some kind of finish. Or does it just have to look good long enough to publish the video?
yes, this statement in the article is abjectly false. Apple produced MANY laptops from aluminum and even titanium. What distinguishes these earlier designs from current manufacturing processes is that they were produced by forming sheet-metal, rather than milling from a solid block. They were beautiful machines representing meticulous design and manufacturing, and this besmirchment should be rectified at once. Flimsy plastic my butt.
I respect this guy and his tenacity. Get’s a mill for free and, unlike most other reviewers, goes on a 12 months quest to make an iPhone enclosure with it. Damn.