freestompboxes.org

Does anyone know of any vendors that will do custom drilling/punching for a single chassis at a reasonable price? I really just need the socket holes and an IEC hole if possible.

It is gonna be hard to find someone to do less than 10 chassis. You might consider buying a blank chassis from watts tube audio and drilling the socket holes with a unibit, using a dremel and some drill bits to make the IEC socket hole. You could also get a prepunched chassis and have a faceplate made for it to cover any unused holes.
http://gdsamps.com/?page_id=7
http://www.turretboards.com/
http://www.hoffmanamps.com/MyStore/perl ... =174216399

ponoko.com will laser cut a metal sheet for you if you can fold it yourself.

If you use 2mm thick Aluminium sheet metal, it's really not that hard to cut holes for Valve sockets, and IEC sockets, this is exactly how I made the chassis for my amp head, to make holes for the sockets, you can buy hole saws that fit in standard electric drills, to cut the sheet metal to size, I just used an electric jig saw fitted with metal cutting blades, I got an engineering company to do all the folding for me on a hydraulic folding machine, and then I got them to Mig-Weld all the four corners, so I ended up with a very strong chassis, I used some metal files to smooth off any rough edges....


I seriously need to have a go at building an amp using turret or eyelet boards....

Hides-His-Eyes wrote:ponoko.com will laser cut a metal sheet for you if you can fold it yourself.

Awesome. Thanks.

Thanks for the other suggestions, as well. Was just trying to avoid purchasing tools that will get limited use.

Seems they only offer metals in 0.035" thickness.

That's about a millimetre thick? that's pretty standard; hammond enclosures are only a couple of mm thick. I wouldn't worry if it's going inside a wooden box anyway.

Yeah, something like 0.9mm. Seems flimsy to me but I suppose the tweed amplifier chassis are only a little thicker than 1mm. Will just have to design for fastened corners.

Not really important but I think that the extra millimeter of thickness is quite significant, not to mention other structural advantages, such as typically diminutive sizes.