Portable Custom Parts and Enclosures: Design Tips

Sometimes, your project requires designing portable custom parts and enclosures, whether for taking it out in the field for research or transporting to meetings. One common challenge is achieving a balance between durability, functionality and ease of transportation. Whether the enclosure is intended to house electronics, tools, or equipment, ensuring portability without compromising functionality is key.

In this blog, we share a few design tips to achieve portable yet durable designs that meet your project’s requirements.

Material

The material you choose for the enclosure plays a big role in its weight, durability and overall functionality. If you’re working on something meant to be portable, it’s definitely something you’ll want to nail right from the start.

• Aluminum: It is lightweight, corrosion-resistant and easy to fabricate. Plus, its versatility makes it a great choice for projects where lightweight is essential.
• Stainless Steel: It comes with outstanding strength and wear resistance. While heavier than aluminum, it is ideal when ruggedness is important, like in industrial or outdoor settings.
• Hybrid Designs with Plastics: If weight is a major concern, combining metal with engineered plastics such as UHMW or Acrylic is an effective solution.

Choose the thinnest metal gauge that still does the job. Thinner sheets help keep your enclosure lightweight without losing strength or functionality.

Balance

Portability is also about finding the right balance. You should look to keep things lightweight while still strong and sturdy. When designing enclosures, it’s a good idea to focus on creative features that help find the right balance.

• Thin Walls with Reinforcements: Thinner materials can be strengthened using reinforcing features such as bent flanges or brackets. These enhance rigidity while minimizing weight.
• Alternative Cutouts: You can create cutouts in non-critical areas of the enclosure. This reduces weight without compromising strength. However, you obviously need to be cautious in order to avoid affecting any essential structural elements.

Ergonomics

Next, let’s think about design ergonomics. When designing portable enclosures, comfort and usability are just as important as functionality. By focusing on an ergonomic design for your enclosure, you can ensure that your enclosure is easy for end-users to carry and transport.

• Rounded Corners and Edges: Sharp corners and edges can make enclosures difficult to handle, particularly over extended periods. Rounded edges or chamfers (a common CNC feature) allow for safer, more comfortable handling. Using large rad tooling and step bends will produce a more rounded surface but will typically be larger in size.
• Compact Shapes: You may want to opt for sleek, compact designs that avoid irregular or awkward shapes, making the enclosure easier to carry. A great option is to first look at our stocked list of customizable aluminum diecast enclosures. Within each category of standard, watertight light and watertight heavy, there are smaller sizes of enclosures that can be modified with necessary hardware and work perfectly as a portable enclosure.
• Balanced Weight Distribution: Uneven weight distribution can strain the user. Aim for a well-placed center of gravity, especially for handheld enclosures.
• Choice of Electronics: PCB connectors that are rigid on one or multiple sides of the board can present limitations with how the cover, base and side panels fasten together for the connector to properly fit on each side of the enclosure.

Additional Hardware

At Protocase, we stock a wide variety of hardware items that enhance the functionality of your custom enclosures. Handles, latches and other similar features can make portable enclosures far more user-friendly. When incorporating these elements into your design, consider the following:

• Built-in Handles: Sheet metal and machined enclosures can be designed to incorporate handles. This minimizes the number of additional parts while maintaining strength.
• Casters and Wheels: For larger enclosures that need to be mobile, adding casters or wheels can significantly improve portability. These can be lockable to ensure stability when the enclosure needs to remain stationary.
• Latches, Hinges and Quick-Release Fasteners: Easy-to-use latches or quick-release fasteners provide secure yet simple access to the enclosure’s interior while minimizing setup or teardown time during transport.

By selecting the right combination of these hardware elements, you can design custom enclosures that perfectly meet their portability needs while maintaining functionality and professional aesthetics.

Need a Pelican Case? Design Custom Panels in Protocase Designer

If your project requires housing electronics inside Pelican cases, for which portability is their entire purpose, or mounting parts to the interior of Pelican cases, you can design custom Pelican panels for those components in our in-house design software Protocase Designer. You can start from eight different panel templates for eight different Pelican case sizes!

Conclusion

In the end, designing for portability doesn’t have to mean a compromise between functionality and ease of use. By selecting the right materials, optimizing weight, focusing on ergonomics and integrating hardware like handles, you can design portable custom parts or enclosures that are both robust and portable.