Interesting.
It’s been two weeks, and I am not a heavy typer. In fact the most stress-inducing is probably me putting the laptop on its sides when it’s in my bag, but I put it screen facing away, so if anything it should be bent the other way.
Confirms my suspicion that the chassis isn’t quite stiff enough. Needs MOAR metal!
Does it maybe make sense for it to not be as bendy when I stack two SD card beneath the middle expansion slot?
I don’t mind 3D printing and taping on some additional feet, if the chassis needs more support from the surface beneath it. But mmmmmm.
Aah, maybe I can drill holes through the tub chassis and stiffen it up with some scrapped 3/16 steel sheets. Hm. We’ll see about that.
How thick is the bottom? 1/16? Probably closer to 3/64 if you ask me
Not trying to discredit you or anything, but did you check if the chassis was straight when you received it? It is possible that was the way it was from the start.
Also when you close the laptop does it shut completely or is that bend still noticeable?
No I didn’t. That’s a bit of a oversight, yes. But I wasn’t expecting it.
Well the chassis is bowed down the middle, so yes, there’s a very small gap (maybe 0.5mm), as the lid is flat.
I also have a similar issue. The “Bend” is slightly more significant on one of the two sides though.
For me its been about 2-3 Months to notice it. I didn’t really do much with the Laptop in that time in terms of moving it. Had it in a laptop bag 6 times (3 trips) and I never left the bag unattended or had anything happen to it.
I am planning to contact support about this and ask if this is normal unless anyone already has done that already and has some info on that?
I checked mine out of curiosity. Batch 9 and it gets thrown into a backpack and moved back and forth about four times per week. No bend on mine.
Update:
So I put my own feet on the device. They are taller than factory one, but I did that mostly because I think the chassis bending is due to the chassis being not stiff enough to support itself in the middle.
The feet are about 8mm to 10mm in diameter each, round. I put 9 of them on the bottom – 4, 1 on each corner close to the factory feet. another 4, around the expansion module slot 1,3,4,6. And two in the middle.
After I do that, I am able to rock my laptop back and forth, confirming that the entire tub chassis is, in fact, bending.
I put these extra feet on to try to fix the issue (of it bending due to gravity), but I think the simple act of putting the device on a flat table don’t have enough oomph to push the metal beyond elastic into plastic deformation (which it clearly suffered from, since it’s holding the bowed shape now)
I might do a reverse bend, but I don’t want to destroy my $1600 investment.
I also have an issue with a sort of electric buzzing, alongside some unexplained crashes that started (lately), I am unsure if it is related to then “bending” issue though. I have contacted support about this. Let’s see if they can diagnose this.
And I also found this Post of pictures looking similar to this issue with it possibly being related to another hardware issue:
I will do some investigation, whether I also have this issue with uneven thermals.
I have just checked on mine. 6 months of use in - the chassis seems to be decently bent.
Also, I have noticed that the bottom feet do not sit perfectly on the desk, but the left and right extremities are lifted up. Very evident here:
Using a ruler, various other points of the laptop are not perfectly straight.
I think it’s a design flaw, and this chassis material simply isn’t solid enough to stay perfectly straight for long if you use it like a laptop should be used - directly, and being taken out and about. This is further confirmed by the fact that over the months I have started noticing just how flimsy and creaky the entire laptop is. Move the lid - creak. Pick it up in a way it doesn’t like - creak. Move the laptop around - creak, once again.
This is nothing entirely new, either. Large diagonal laptops tend to suffer from deck flex and bending issues more than smaller laptops, as the much larger surface is simply much more prone to deflection. You know when people recommend against gaming laptops due to their build quality? It’s not their performance and discrete GPU that makes the build quality worse, it’s the larger size. Most ultrabooks are 14" or smaller nowadays, and the niche of “16 inch, no dGPU, non gaming laptop” is in rapid decline. Now, add modularity into the mix, further removing structural integrity, and you got yourself the perfect recipe for deck flex and bending.
I wonder if this is part of what makes my unit feel so rattly.
that’s some pretty terrible bend. Mine doesnt really do that.
I agree. I specifically said reasons a laptop would want more fault-tolerance than a desktop (such as firmware RAID 1s) is because they will be moved around and treated like no desktop ever will. But, we should be able to at least come up with hacky workarounds to make it work.
But that’'s there, and we are here. We want a solution.
Right now, my idea is to get additional feet to give the machine as much support as possible, when using it on a flat surface. Printed TPU strips would be nice (and I have the printer and TPU), however my printer right now (Prusa Mini) have a small amount of skew, so I will be remediating that. Then I will look into designing feet you can glue onto the bottom.
In the meantime, chunky SuperSliders is probably your next best option.
Well. If anything, Dell Precisions (and Inspirons and various), and even Thinkpads are selling quite like the hot cakes. A lot of people want bigger screens, numpad, and as many ports as possible. Sure, they typically come with options with a discrete GPU, but that’s, again, optional, and I have seen plenty of people opting for the integrated GPU versions, knowing they won’t be doing much gaming.
Ugh. Time to open my… fourth? Fifth? Support ticket. Ufff.
As for the rest, thanks for the workarounds! I will keep these in mind.
Do they just mail you a new chassis, or a whole machine?
If you have old chassis(es) you can try bending them back straight, then purchase a sheet metal (think 1/8 inch at least) and bolt them together.
Oh, they were not about the chassis - sorry! It was mostly silly defects from early pre-order batches. All stuff that seems to be sorted on the new laptops that are sold now.
It’s the usual curse of the pre-order units: the early hardware runs will be early hardware runs.
Those are fairly hard TPU, I think probably 40D, maybe even 60D. Ideally I want something a tad softer, but framework’s stock feet is also pretty hard, so … 
I guess if you want I can send the model files in. They are really not that hard. 10mm wide x 7mm tall x 50mm (and 100mm) long, respectively. Then you have 3mm chamfer on those edges facing downward.
Literally took me like 2 minute to design them.
Hopefully these will get knocked off a lot less often than those clear ones.
My left side seem to be a lot more bendy than the right side. Right side is almost flat.
You can see it in the picture, as well. The left side has feet lifting up, but the right side doesn’t.
Damn, that’s a nice fix. Thank you!
For what it’s worth, I have also seen that my right side seems bendier than my left side. It is very noticeable here.
I am considering contacting support actually. This might be within tolerances, but I guess having further data points can only help.
i think the Slight bend is normal. My Machine also has it.
Just to collect your information, does your machine also have an issue with the “consistency” of keyboard and touchpad clicks? Because I have been wondering if issues some users are having are somehow related to the extent of the bend. I am having very similar complaints to This Community thread here. Basically, typing on my keyboard can at times be rattly, and not all the keys sound the same. Some keys feel stiff and sound like they should, like the Super key, while others feel a lot softer and sound “worse” - either leaving a layer of reverb, or a sibilant noise, or a weird metallic “clanking” noise. The touchpad is a similar story, it sounds okay except on some clicks when it doesn’t and it just makes a rattling / buzzing sound, more reliably when the palm is resting on the side. The “Esc” key is the worst. When I click it, I just hear a loud “clank”. I shimmed it with a small piece of electrical tape bent on itself (it is not glued to anything, it just rests there) and boom, covering that gap completely fixed that behaviour, and the Esc key sounds fine now.
If you look closely, the mid plate seems to be slightly warped upwards in some positions - especially those that have Deflection Kit pads below them - and the keyboard, once installed, does not sit flush on the mid plate, there is a actually a gap between the keyboard and the mid plate, and neither is straight. EG the keyboard bends up in the middle. I’ve tried a mid-plate and keyboard replacement, that didn’t help. Tried reseating everything half a million times, that didn’t help either. I managed to somehow fit the keyboard in a way that it no longer bent upwards, and just a couple weeks later, there it is again, bending up again. The touchpad module also seems to not sit straight on the laptop: when taken off, it’s straight. But when it is applied, the z-axis distance between the module and the keyboard and spacers is not constant. It seems to bend down somewhere near the middle, where it meets the keyboard, it touches it, and it also bends the keyboard down with it. Removing the touchpad module and looking at the keyboard, it is very evident that the keyboard is warped circa where the Space key is, it does not sit straight and it bends down with the mid-plate in one point, so, as a result, it is basically a “wave” that, from left to right, goes like “tall, short, tall again”. At this point I am wondering if the slight bend can be more or less slight depending on the unit, and my bend that seems to be pretty bad is somehow causing the mid-plate and the input modules to never be able to sit straight, thus creating all kinds of gaps, which in turn make the entire thing feel rattly and just "not good’. What puzzles me is that I didn’t remember my laptop behaving like this when I first got it - actually, I remember feeling absolutely impressed by the premium feel of the keyboard and touchpad, and how silent they sounded - it only had the faintest hint of a rattling while typing if I listened really close, but then it seemed to kind of get worse as the months went by.
I’m basically trying to gauge whether my unit indeed does have a problem, or every unit does this and most people are just not sensitive to these imperfections. Support has already told me everything is fine, but it doesn’t seem anywhere close to “fine” to me. It doesn’t sound anything like it does in the reviews where they put a microphone next to the keyboard and type.
Those are consistent. Or, consistent enough. I’m not a discerning typist.
do you have the keyboard deflection kit installed by chance?
