Here's our cheap weatherproof box for housing a cosmic ray detector on a wet & windy rooftop.. We've tried this out during some very nasty weather, and it's stayed perfectly dry. All of the plywood for a single box can be cut from one piece of 4 x 8 5/8 " plywood, and the total cost of materials for 4 boxes at Home Depot was about $120, or $ 30.00 a box. Not too bad....
Template for cutting the plywood
Below, the final step : Finishing and mounting on the roof.
We set our box on 3 half cinderblocks, to prevent the bottom from soaking up water. As our roof is a little "soft". we set the cinderblocks on scrap wood so they wouldn't dig into the tar.
We drilled small holes through the bottom of the box and ran scrap wire through the cinderblock holes and tied it off inside the box. This may provide some additional insurance against take-off in a windstorm.
Instead of using any nice (and expensive) cabinet hardware, we set screws into all 4 sides of the box, and directly above those screws we set 4 screws in the bottom of the box roof. We used plastic cable ties to attach the roof tightly to the box.
When we set a detector in the box, we'll drill another hole in the bottom of the box to run the singal and power supply cables.
