Hi Everyone, my girlfriend has been on the search for a pink laptop for a long time to replace her Razer laptop. Given that the options are extremely limited/nonexistent, I thought to myself why not put together a laptop that’ll fit her needs? Her needs being a pink laptop and nothing else.
So here I am, wondering about the feasibility of having the chassis machined at a CNC shop using pink aluminum. Has anyone had experience making their own chassis? Are there any issues you’ve encountered I should pay attention to?
I’m not sure if it’s the same for the Framework 16 - but the Framework 13’s CAD files were missing a lot of details, like mounting points and brackets, which would be necessary to print/CNC your own enclosure. You’d likely have to do that work yourself… I’ve been working on a custom chassis project for the 13, but I must wait a bit longer to start prototyping myself so I can’t recommend this yet.
Maybe it’s worth looking into anodising or painting a FW16 shell in the desired colour?
This feels worded a wee bit oddly to me. As one can’t really say they would use “pink aluminum”. No aluminum stock would be colored at that point. All colors for aluminum are just a thin surface finish. Which is only done at the end, after CNC or any other processing. Just want to check that you’re not under a false impression.
I believe the lid is aluminum, the touchpad module surface is aluminum, and the bottom chassis is magnesium. So you may only need to have a bottom made. The other parts, you may be able to have an anodizing shop strip & re-anodize in the shade of pink you’d like. It would be some work to remove any parts which can’t remain on for the anodizing, but I would think that’s still less effort and money than making all new parts.
I do believe at least one person had a framework stripped and re-anodized. You could search for the thread to get an idea of what would be involved. It was a FWL13 done in all black iirc. I recall another person do a blue Framework, but I think that might have be using paint or power coating.
Good luck in the endeavor. I love seeing people color their Frameworks!
I have no issue with modifying the CAD files myself if that’s necessary for the mounting points/brackets. Again, I plan to print off the file just to see what is included and if assembling the laptop is even possible on a 3d printed prototype, then making adjustments as needed.
To the point about skins, I looked at these and unfortunately they’re not nearly as durable/sleek as I’d like. Thanks for the suggestion though!
It seems like anodization might be the popular suggestion, and I appreciate it. I’m not familiar with the terminology, but after looking at who I was planning to have make the body, yeah the pink aluminum is just anodized aluminum in a matte pink finish.
Its an interesting thought and would make for a cool project. But, in the UK at least, if you were to supply a 3d model of each component, compatible with their software, a machine shop would be charging somewhere around £2K to program the tool paths, design and manufacture fixtures and then make a single set of parts. Then if you don’t want to see the tool marks you’d need to have the parts tumbled or blasted before they are annodised. And all the material ideally needs to come from the same manufacturing batch otherwise the finished annodise will be slightly different shades.
