Build versus buy, materials, and designs
There are a lot of options available to you depending on how confident you are working with easily available materials. If I had to make design choices for any enclosure, I prefer to have the following:
- Front-mounted doors, with a preference for doors that open up and away (i.e., with the hinges mounted on the top).
- A clamshell-type design, which allows me to have complete access to all sides of the machine with the enclosure open. This is one of the designs I have listed previously.
- Plenty of openings for wires and hoses. If it is an integral enclosure, I either need enough real estate on the top or side to mount any controllers or long-enough cabling for the controller to mount to the door or an inset at the front. This is what I ended up doing for my laser. The controllers are all on the outside, as is any hardware to job the machine (e.g., an LCD controller).
A cursory look online yields a variety of available units...
