The final pieces are on order and now I’m moving to assembling the TVT’s case. For trial purposes, I built the first case out of fir and plywood. I had initially thought plywood was correct – in pictures of the original it appeared to be plywood peeking out from the left side where the vinyl covering had peeled away. I was wrong. It was metal. And indeed, if I’d read the manual all the way though I would have known that all along – the article strongly recommended using a metal case to prevent RF interference from the device, which is a no-no!
For the side pieces I went with red oak. I kept looking at photos of the original and that seemed to be, in terms of grain, as close as I could get. I even got a bit cheeky and made sure the right side had a knothole, similar to the prototype!
I then routered out the insides. This wasn’t quite as hard the second time around, although I did accidentally cut a notch through the front of the right side. Argh! I’ll have to figure out a way to fix that.
The case is assembled with a piece of 5/4″ wood (yes, that’s what it’s called) for the front ‘palmrest’, and then the back is a piece of sheet metal from Canadian Tire. One thing I learned for bending metal – you need a brake! I thought it’d be easy enough to fashion the metal into a box shape with nice crisp corners. Nope! Turns out metal really resists corner shapes! No matter how much force I put on it, I couldn’t do it. I ended up using a ballpeen hammer and an edge to bang it more or less into shape. Thank goodness it’ll be covered with vinyl!
Looking alright. To hold it all together, I ended up using No More Nails. That stuff is quite strong and was able to hold the metal in place. To bond the vinyl to the metal top, I initially used the same but as you can see in the pictures, it developed serious wrinkles. So, I ripped it off (I had lots of vinyl; a square yard can cover a lot of TVTs!), sanded down, and did it with contact cement. Much better, no wrinkles!
The really tricky part of assembly was getting the keyboard to fit – when I first put it together, the return and space keys were binding on the case. I had to router things out a bit more (hence the accidental notch). I realized later my case dimensions were out by about 1/4″ of an inch. Not noticeable visually, but enough to cause these sorts of assembly headaches.
Anyway, after the glue has set, we have a pretty good facsimile of the original. Check it out – mine is up top (obviously) and the original is pictured at the museum below:
Not bad if I do say so myself! So yeah, basically I need to find a way to fix that accidental notch, because I am not messing with the router again. And then I need to get the legends and nameplate made up. Probably Front Panel Express will be where I go to do that. But for now, on to getting the main unit actually working!