Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

This drills 1mm holes into the poles for the screws to tap in. As mentioned in step B03, the 1mm holes also did not work perfectly. In my opinion they are better than the 1.5mm holes I used on the bottom half, but the longer poles near the display were split by the screws in this case. If you come up with a better solution, I would like to know.

This is probably the best example of how different materials, despite appearing like you can machine them to look the same, will behave very differently. Wood is, in particular, very different from plastic and metal, because it is far more anisotropic due to its grain structure. Those long and narrow bosses are acceptable in a metal or plastic part, but won't hold up at all in wood. For a better solution, I recommend not trying to follow the exact shape as the plastic part for the internals, but have as much material as possible; if you need to, use longer screws.

Many electronics were housed in wooden cabinets for over a century (e.g. radios, televisions, turntables, etc.), so it would be wise to look at those for examples of how they used wood in their design.

A hidden property of wood, that I'm sure every woodworker knows and nods knowingly at this, is that it changes size as a function of humidity. You measure everything perfectly in a humid summer expecting it to behave like a chunk of metal, and then it all falls apart when dry winter rolls in.

That's when you start noticing particular details in professional furniture that are designed to accommodate this; things like certain elements intentionally not being glued or attached to allow for this movement.

I built myself a shed earlier in the year and the right now my unclosable windows are a damning reminder of this fact.

Get a wood planer, either manual or automatic (electrical). If you can temporarily remove the window you can shave off just a bit of wood to give it more space.

That’s my plan. We’re in the Uk and it’s basically rained most days this year. Will take a look once things dry out. In the meantime I’ve just been leaving the windows open for ventilation anyway.

    >  I recommend not trying to follow the exact shape
    > as the plastic part for the internals[...]

Good advice in general, but in this case I don't see how they'd have that option, as the long poles need to mount the display and a circuit board. See [1] and subsequently [2], and [3] which shows the rear of the GameBoy (where those screws go).

I think a better solution in this case is to either just forgo wood for those particular areas, e.g. you could use plastic or metal parts that the screws would go into, and glue or otherwise securely mount those to the wood.

Or similarly, use wood for the poles, but don't drill holes in them, and use some alternate mechanism to hold the body together. They're already using magnets for the battery cover, and could presumably use a large amount of magnets to hold the two pieces of the body itself together.

Finally, I don't think looking at antique wooden electronics is going to be useful. When electronic consumer products were made out of wood the electrical components were much bigger, so they didn't need to deal with these sorts of problems. Most of those only used wood as the "box", see e.g. [4].

1. https://there.oughta.be/assets/images/2023-11-03/asm4.jpg

2. https://there.oughta.be/assets/images/2023-11-03/asm5.jpg

3. https://there.oughta.be/assets/images/2023-11-03/batteries.j...

4. https://halestrom.net/darksleep/blog/001_jena5020radio/

The holes could be tapped before shaving down the wood, and then screws with less thick threads could be used. That would prevent splitting and still provide a secure connection.

There's better and worse ways to do this, but in the end wood is just inherently unsuitable for things of this size.

Any screw needs to "grab" onto the side of the hole it's drilled into, when that screw is going through a cylinder that looks to me 1-3mm in diameter it'll only take so much force before it'll snap.

And that's assuming that you get lucky with the material, you might run into a knot in the wood, in which case it would just fall apart without any force being applied to it.

I've made small woodworking projects by hand with clearances like this. You just need to understand the grain and type of wood and be careful. Once it's assembled it'll be strong enough for general use.

i dont work in wood very much, but cocobolo and ebony machine alot more like a soft metal. you can certainly catch the grain wrong and chip off a piece, but they take a thread pretty well.

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