Bending (near-)perfect 90° angles is pretty much impossible. You'd never get a satisfactory grade of accuracy. Bending thin steel sheets just for increased strenght works great, but it's a rather expensive process (that you can't do well on your own).
And again - thin sheets can't be joined "the Ultimaker way".
It makes me wonder, do you really need the Ultimaker way? Just a simple sheet metal brake and using other squarely cut panels as guides and attachment points might be enough to make the frame square enough to function properly and to fold the sheets enough to make things rigid. You could just bolt flat segment to flat sheet, not at right angles, eliminating the nut trap issues.
Trespa seems an incredibly interesting option, but like you say, cutting it properly is the issue. Even if I were to find an affordable way of cutting the stuff, not having the option to make replacement panels with some ease bugs me. I know I will upgrade the printer in the future and cheaply cutting updated panels is a major pro for me.
Trespa is obviously superior to birch ply, but I doubt whether you will actually notice a huge amount of different in every day use. Tropical areas possibly excepted. Why can't water jets be cheap and readily available?
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Hmmm. Looked up the thermal expansion coefficients of steel and Al and they aren't horrifically different. Al is only double that of steel. Both are the order of 10^-5/K. Even if the frame is heated to 100 degrees above room temperature, the expansion is only 0.01%. Besides, even if the frame doesn't expand, the z axis lead screw still will.
As for thermal conductivity, I have some real doubts a about how much if a difference that actually makes and could be accounted for by blanketing the interior with felt or something like that. It might decrease system energy consumption and warm up time, but probably not a huge impact on performance.
Obviously much of the specifics depend on the precise steel or Al alloy.
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