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Posts Tagged ‘3d printed backplane’
3D Printing a Computer Motherboard Backplane
25, Jan 2017
One of the most annoying things that can happen to you is to lose the backplane of a motherboard when you are installing it to a computer case. There are so many variations of backplanes for different motherboards and finding a suitable one is not an easy task. eBay sometimes is your friend, but often there you find overpriced backplanes and when you ad in shipping cost is simply is not worth buying one. The alternative – quickly drawing and then 3D print the backplane you need…
It all started as an experiment with a quick test drawing the insides of a backplane, extruding it to 2mm height and gluing the resulted 3D printed backplane on a frame from an existing backplane. Of course the insides of the non-compatible motherboard backplane needs to be cut first, but that is not a hard thing to do with the right tools and the result does seem to be surprisingly good.
Measuring and replicating the right dimensions with a bit of tweaking of the shapes has produced surprisingly good result for the first test run. So good that I will most likely do some more experimenting with a few more backplanes and why not even do a complete backplane with the frame. Not having to destroy an existing backplane just so that the metal frame can be used saves some time and efforts and if the results are good it won’t be a bad idea to use a 3D print the whole thing in one piece.
Off to the “drawing board” for the next backplane and then will go for a full once piece solution, though I do have some doubts that the plastic may quickly wear off where it needs to be attached to the computer case. Regardless the backplane is not something that you will need to often remove and reinsert again, so if it manages to hold up to a couple of insert/remove cycles it should still be fine.