Steps in Production
I prepared a 2x2' A1008 sheet for the laser cutter and got cutting... With more optimized geometry, cutting the entire thing only took 36 minutes from start to finish. I'm sure this is more obvious for the more experienced, but using fillets liberally across a laser cut design helps the tool head retain more velocity through passes, cutting down on machine time notably. This is a bit different from machining where fillets should be used very purposefully as they are an extra processing step, but for a "2D" operation like this, they are very useful especially on repeated geometry like the vent patterns shown below.
Here is a layout of all the parts after some basic deburring.
I really should have cut these so that all the engraving lines were on the correct side for bending, but it's nothing a scribe can't fix.
None of these intersect and are very easy to bend on a super basic press brake, in poor condition at that, minus the drive bay which was a little more hard to fit. I've also tested using a vice as a makeshift stamping tool--if you had some sort of V-block and a square bar, you can bend 20 gauge steel fairly nicely and cleanly. More on that later.
Here is a layout of the parts after all the bending. They look pretty damn good!
Some parts are not that great out of the brake, and need some retouching to get right. Particularly, with my tooling, the blade of the press brake was not quite linear, resulting in a notable variation of bend angle along flanges. You can help flatten this out with a vice and some parallels or other flat sided stock.
Clamp the un-flat flange between the two faces of the stock and use the vice and apply some good pressure to form the metal into one straight piece. You can also slightly change the placement of the flat stock, placing one corner against a flange corner, a piece behind the workpiece, to sort of bottom bend a flange to spec.
A nice resource that was rather quite helpful: https://www.komaspec.com/about-us/blog/guide-to-sheet-metal-bending/
Due to the geometry of my drive bay, I couldn't fully bend it to 90 degrees on the press brake--you can either opt to use a technique I forgot the reference link for, in which you bend a centerline between the two bends on the opposite side to gain clearance, or do what I did and only bend the metal about 60-70 degrees, then form it to spec on a vice. Makes me wonder what I can achieve with a makeshift press using some dies and a vice...
