exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Really cool. Too bad nobody seems to know whatever happened to the other (ST/MegaST/STe/MegaSTe/TT/Falcon) molds.

dhedberg wrote: ↑Mon Sep 24, 2018 2:31 pm Really cool. Too bad nobody seems to know whatever happened to the other (ST/MegaST/STe/MegaSTe/TT/Falcon) molds.

Indeed Likely I fear been recycled after all this time.

One thing I've read about recently, is injection moulds that use 3d printing to create them. Wonder if that might be an option?

rubber_jonnie wrote: ↑Fri Dec 14, 2018 1:17 pm One thing I've read about recently, is injection moulds that use 3d printing to create them. Wonder if that might be an option?

Its probably been talking about before.. but still the same problem of physical sizes and cost of production. You can actually take a mould from a original case and avoid the 3D printing step all together, but again the costs were way to high.

Icky, where did we yet up to with all this ?

exxos wrote: ↑Sun Feb 17, 2019 1:55 pm Icky, where did we yet up to with all this ?

Got a bit side tracked with this being bumped down in priority on my projects list. Painting my sons bedroom being this weekends priority project.

I'll take look back at the files and see where I got to.

As a update, we haven't given up on finding a solution. Though as said many times, we need to raise like £50,000+ just to get the moulds made.

I was talking to a company just a couple hours ago in fact, about possible options. Though the guy was helpful, and we may be able to work out a cheaper price, it still remains that we need huge sums of cash to get started.

The fact is, the Atari community isn't as large as other retro communities, so 500 people would have to donate £100 each to even think about getting started . I just don't see it happening. Its not that we are not willing to do the work, just the cost of it all is massive.

Also in terms of other remake case for c64 etc, its a lot smaller than the ST cases, so the moulds are not as expensive. The ST case is so large that a lot of companies cannot even work to that size even.

Myself and icky are constantly trying to think up ways to make the case modular and made in smaller chunks. Its the only real option. Pretty much its all been talked about before anyway. I just wanted to mention we haven't given up trying to find solutions, but without serious funds, its a huge problem.

Just updating this thread.

Exxos and I have been exploring many avenues for the STFM Case Remake. We have been able to print out a very rough sections print at 1/3 scale. This printed case has allowed us to understand the issues with the current 3D files. The 3 sections are the bottom as a whole, the top rear section and the top keyboard section.

We are working our way through the issues with the files and then looking to print out each part of the case top and bottom of the STFM case in 6 sections at full size on our 3D printers. This will then give us a good perspective on how it looks and fits as a proper STFM case going forward. It will probably look pretty shabby connected together in sections but it's the way forward towards the final case.

So we present the first pictures of the 1/3 scale STFM case placed on an TT HDD case for scale.

Some more pics of the bottom part of the case at 1/3 scale to help show the profile

That looks pretty amazing, what material and resolution are you using and what is the print time at that scale?