Hi Richard!
It hurts a little to read this because I feel your pain as a hobbyist and also know why our enclosures had to get more expensive. It’s always tough balancing cost versus performance! I know you’re not really asking, but I feel compelled to discuss why. There are a lot of reasons, but here are the highlights of why the new enclosures are a little more expensive:
- The raw materials have gone up a ton. When we first started selling acrylic tubes, a 4" tube, 12" long, was about $22 from ePlastics (which is where we originally bought them). They’re over $60 now just for the tube itself.
- It’s a really hard to make an enclosure that can be consistently produced with stock materials without post-machining because the tolerances are pretty large and quickly go outside of what your flange/O-ring are designed for. This happened a lot to us and we had to scrap a lot of tubes over the years!
- The new features (locking cord, anti-rotation, machined ends) do increase the costs but they’re also things that customers consistently asked for so we felt it was important to address. A lot of people were frustrated with the limitations and inconsistency of the original design.
I think it’s important to note, the increased depth ratings don’t actually cost anything! That’s more about designing the tube thicknesses properly and being able to test them!
If I was designing an enclosure to be low-cost, I’d probably do the following things:
- Use O-rings! O-rings work really well and they are cheap.
- Use a fairly large cross section O-ring, which can handle loose tolerances better.
- Use a commonly available tube like PVC
- I’d still use our tube/flange/end-cap configuration because it works well and it’s really flexible
What tools do you have available to use for this?
I hope this answer is helpful and I’m excited to see what comes of this thread!
-Rusty