Taking a lateral look at my ongoing difficulty of finding decent enclosures for LCD displays (the thought of drilling lots of holes and filing to a neat finish fills me with deep despair)  I came across  a company called RazorLAB.

RazorLAB offers an on-line laser cutting and engraving service for what to me is a quite reasonable price, on a range of materials including ply and Acrylic. They suggest you plan for about a 3-4 week turnaround but I got mine back within the week.

I used ply basically because it was the cheaper than Acrylic, but look at the website for the full range of materials available. With ply you are left with some limited burn marks on the cut material but you should be able to sand these out in most cases.

Designs are created in Illustrator, CorelDRAW or Inksape. The latter is available to down load for free so it the obvious choice for try out. You can easily upload your design to check on cost – but note the initial pricing information does not include VAT or postage. There is also clear guidance on how to format your designs correctly for their ‘system’ accepts them. In simple terms once you make an allowance for the base material, the cost is driven by the laser cutting time, in general lots of solid engraved words will cost more that a few simple straight line cuts. The total cost for 4 angled stands [ see picture] came to about £27 which works out at £6.75 a unit.

There is a basis syntax check as part of the upload, but it is well worth taking their advice to print out your design on paper / card and try it before committing.

The only really annoying point for me was that I increased the size to make sure I could fit a Raspberry Pi below the LCD and 2 days later the A+ is announced which meant I could have made the whole thing smaller !