Homemade racket case

So after half a year of planning , finally next week I'll be meeting my friend who has a company which is making high-quality plastic stuff to talk about making my racket case project's outer hard shell.

I hope he can make something nice for a reasonable price, cause the foam insert is ready

finally met my friend who has a plastics making company to talk about my racket case and the results aren't that good.

Basically, there are two ways to make stuff from plastic -injection molding and thermoforming. In the first case, the plastic pallets are melted into liquid and injected with a help of special machinery into the mold. This is used for mass production and the mold costs start from ten thousand eur and goes waaayyy up. The more down to earth is thermoforming. Basically, you take a pre-made thin sheet of plastic, heat it to become soft and then it is pressed into form. This method is used for small batches, so the costs for a press-form start from a couple of hundred dollars up to a couple of thousands, but the premade plastic sheets are much more expensive than plastic pallets for injection molding.

For me to make a hard plastic case would cost ~200 dollars to make a form and ~10-30 for plastics depending on the plastic chosen. That would make the most expensive racket case ever . Besides the costs, it seems that to make the case rigid enough (so that it couldn't be pressed in the middle without using a considerable amount of force) the plastic has to be really thick (at least 3 mm or so) and the sheets available aren't that aesthetically nice either..

It seems the plastic isn't the best material and I should explore other options, like making it from an aluminum sheet. So now the plan is during this/next week to see some metal fabricator and explore of its feasible.

Maybe someone has other ideas?

Xylit said:

View attachment 17265

5,90 €

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Thanks. Never have thought about that I was always wondering if people carry balls in the outer pocket? Cause to me it looks that the purpose of the pocket is to crush the balls.

So talked with metal stuff fabricators about making all aluminium case. Same story as making the case shell from plastic. If you want to make an nice one piece shell to put a foam insert you have to stamp it from a single sheet of metal and for that you need a press-form. And that's 10k we are talking about...

Another way is to try to make the case by welding a box and then polishing the weld lines. But that's not an easy job as it is hard to weld thin sheets, polish them and to retain the straight shape. So it's around 100-200 eur

Still thinking about other options

Loopadoop said:

Why not make it out of nice wood. You could also put a separate cut wood inlay inside the case covered with a nice felt cloth. You could do all the wood work yourself. It could look like a nice piece of furniture.

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Well, If I could do the wood work myself (I wish I could) I'd be doing blades, not the case
I thought as an option to make it from wood. It would look very premium and I think it would be great as a showcase case, not as an everyday carry case. I think it would be heavy and bulky, more like the chessboard...

langel said:

3D printing?

https://www.sparkfun.com/news/2674

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thought about that too. Talked with a person who is into that. It depends on the technology (there are a couple of different) so it could be either very very expensive, very expensive (couple hundreds of EUR) or reasonably expensive (~50-100). So the case printed using the cheaper method using PLA would be either rather flimsy or again, rather thick. Also although it would be at first rather flimsy, after applying pressure and reaching some point it would break, not like for example aluminium, which wouldn't break, but just get a notch

lVegita said:

Since you have the custom foam, you can use pretty much any outer box that looks nice.
You can look for a small suitcase or microphone/pedal/camera/whatever case and replace the inside foam with your own.

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yes, that's always an option