Where to buy fine nuts bolts & standoffs for an acylic case.

[chrestomanci]

Hello

I have a CubieBoard ARM dev board. (Similar size to a RaspberryPi).

I also have with it an Acrylic simple case. It is a very simple design consisting of two sheets of acylic that go either side of the board with spacers and stand-offs.



Anyway, I would like to make a larger version of the case with enough room to put an SSD next to to the CubieBoard, and wider spacers so that I can attach a heatsink to the CPU.

I have already found a source of acrylic, (that I can cut and drill quite easily with hand tools), but I am having trouble finding a source of spacers and the like. Any suggestions?

Ideally I am looking for some really long bolts and nuts to go with them. Probably an M3, or just threaded rods. An alternative might be to buy thicker blocks of acrylic and then screw into it with self tapping screws, but I am less confident it would work, as I might just split or shatter the acrylic.

Any better ideas?

[Pob255]

Probably standard M3 thread, will the nuts go smoothly onto an external drive mounting screw?
Normal PC cases use two standard screws (metric) M3 (for external drives, sometimes motherboard mounting but not always) and (imperial) 6-32 (used for panels, hard drives, psu and sometimes motherboard mounting)

Top is 6-32, bottom is M3

Once you know what thread you need then it's fairly easy to get hold of spacers, ebay

[piggin23]

http://www.rapidonline.com/SearchRes...icl=1&cat=6389

[chrestomanci]

Probably standard M3 thread, will the nuts go smoothly onto an external drive mounting screw?
Normal PC cases use two standard screws (metric) M3 (for external drives, sometimes motherboard mounting but not always) and (imperial) 6-32 (used for panels, hard drives, psu and sometimes motherboard mounting)

Once you know what thread you need then it's fairly easy to get hold of spacers, ebay

Thanks. I compared the supplied standoffs with some CDROM mounting screws and an old 2.5" hard drive I had lying around. They are M3, which simplifies things.

http://www.rapidonline.com/SearchRes...icl=1&cat=6389

Thanks for the link. The range of stuff there is good, but the pack sizes and minimum order quantities are rather large, so If I ordered the bits I need through them I could easily spend £50 and have loads of parts left over.

Instead I found these guys:

http://www.modelfixings.co.uk/index2.htm

It looks like their main costumers are hobbyists building model aircraft. In any case their range is almost as good, and their pack sizes are small and cheap. For example I can buy a bag of 10 M3 screws for 80p, instead of having to pay a fiver for a box of 100 from rapid online.

[piggin23]

Used these a lot during my last build

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/ballsnutsandbolts

They have a good selection, cheap & deliver next day