Techpriest Enginseer field manual

Page 3 – The other materials

More or less the setup was like this – the hollowed pages would have hard covers wrapped in either leather or cloth (in the end I went for cloth) and would be kept in place by 2 aluminum plates and 2 bolts to a larger plate in the middle cover, where would also be the holes for the chain. Yet at a certain moment, after a toyed around with a 15mm wide aluminum strip I got somewhat worried about it bending so I buffed it up to 3 bolts, 3 pates and 20mm wide strip. Additional strength would be provided by two semi-decorative aluminum strips riveted to the back cover. And speaking of Semi-decorative, only the back cover strips are. The front cover strips have purely decorative purpose, even though it’s arguable that they do provide some reinforcing (and protection). On the picture below you can see the most of the materials I choose to use.

I picked 8mm bolts and aluminum rivets for the front cover and the corners. The lock you see is a simple drawer lock. The original idea for using leather for the covers was sacked in favor of cloth after I carefully examined few books. Velvet was the initial thought but later changed to much more durable black synthetic cloth. Some Velcro tape to keep the laptop in place. The white sheet bellow the whole pile is some sort of very light, soft plastic plate (I suspect foam formed) at 2mm thickness. Poly-vinyl-acetyl-something glue, ideal for both paper and cloth and a can from universal paste (for the material, finding thin white sheet iron was a difficult) I you can see that all of my choices lead to the use of only three colours – black, white и and silver (metal), which was the goal. You see, the colours of the Iron Hands chapter are black and silver and although Cult Mechanicus doesn’t limit its colouring schemes, often used colours with them are rusted red, black and white. So the colour scheme gets to be quite canonic even if I do say so myself :) At this point of course the whole appearance was a mere drawing inside my head, the days were passing by, carrying the EEE PC by hand was aggravating me to the point of leaving it at home.