Case Mod - In Progress BabyShark (10. 10. 2012: It's FINISHED!)

Ahaa you mean te rating , you got 5 stars from me a while ago

 

Me too...

 

I had a feeling it was you guys...

 

You are welcome bro!

 

This is coming along beautifully, as usual, very nice work Nutman freakin awesome! The fan mesh is a very nice touch!

 

Jeg takker.

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Ladies (really?) and gentlemen. I give you: the paintjob.

Or... the results from the paintjob, at least.

All internal parts painted white. Thought I'd also show you the airbrushed logo on the front of the case:



I put the homemade radiator holder back together. This time, I used bolts and rounded nuts (which are kinda my trademark by now) and I think it looks much, much nicer than rivets (even white rivets, yes...):





The blue thing in the back on the first picture is a small support base I made for the pump (you can see it in various pics in the next update). I painted it blue to begin with, as I was going crazy practicing my airbrushing "skills", but later decided that it was looking better in white.

After putting all painted bits back inside the case, I installed the switch for the LED light. You can't see it, but the backside of the switch is light blue and, thus, matches the colour scheme perfectly.

Yes, I'm that anal. It's in the details where greatness is to be found.



And let's continue with some more details.

Flat, black screws on the outside:



... paired with rounded nuts on the inside (and my trusty companion: the dust):



I'm sure some of you will have started loathing the sight of rounded nuts by now, but I think they look dashing.

And speaking of dashing (stirred with a pinch of Too-Full-Of-Myself), here's the solution I came up with for mounting the SSD and the 2.5" conventional HDD:



It's going to sit here:



Like this:



And will be secured like this:



(Noticed the rounded nuts? Did ya? DID YA???)

More details. How to run the fan cable up to the fan controller - gotta love P-clips:



Speaking of the fan controller - this is what it looks like when installed:



The entire 5.25" rack was secured using... (you probably expected rounded nuts) some nice black torx bolts I had lying around. Backed by some MDPC M3 Brainwashers to make those torx bolts sit there snug like a bug in a rug. Or something...



Ok, enough for now. Come back tomorrow for the FINAL update with HIGH RES photos (Not the full res of my 18 MP, as that would be ridiculous. But good enough for most purposes) from the "Finished project photo session". It'll be great, I promise.

 

Wow bro you are at it again!! I love your photos and your attention to detail I really cant wait to see the finished shots!! Mod on bro!

 

Thanks, AnG3L. It means quite a lot, coming from you!

Oh, and don't mind those philips head screws in the last shot there. They will be covered with a rubber strip, which I removed when starting the project. Had to, in order to get to some rivets I had to drill out.

 

Well Mads.. i need to give you high credit for this mod so far..

all the small details looks so amazing.. cant wait to see the final result og this mod, and your scrapbench

 

This is a real great project. Good to see a talented Danish modder aside from Angel.

 

Looks like a great project I look forward to seeing the final pics. 5 Stars from me too.

 

Thanks, my friend. They're coming pretty soon...

Thanks, but I think you left out p0Pe there? He's not going to be too happy, if he reads this...

Thanks for the rating and for commenting. I'll try my best not to disappoint. Final pics and final update up in 15 mins, tops.

 

Ok, beginning this post with the sentence "THE PROJECT IS NOW COMPLETED!", or something similar that, would be pretty generic. And since this project was far from generic (and has been completed for almost one week by now), I will save that sentence for the next line:

THE PROJECT IS NOW COMPLETED!

Yay... \o/

Spent the last 2 weeks, or so, in complete darkness (ok, ok... I had a lamp to work by....). That is, until I started installing some light into the case. I cut a LED strip (cold white) into 3 parts and soldered them together with some small wire. And then I soldered THAT to the switch I showed you in the previous update and finished everything off by sleeving it. Sorry, I don't have any fancy pics of it, so you'll just have to take my word for it: It works and it looks great, too.

However, I CAN show you the LED light strip right before it was installed into the case:



And after:



*Imagine me switching the LED lights on and off all the time*

More and more details....

This is the cable for the HD Audio connections on the top of the case. Nice secured with P-clips 'n all. Little did I know that when installing the GTX690, the HD Audio connector would actually not fit - it stopped the GTX690 from going all the way into the PCI-E socket. A little treat for me, all mixed together by ASUS, EKWB and NVIDIA. Thank you, guys.



Oh well, no need crying over spilled milk, they say. So let's shorten some more cables - this time, it's time for the power button, reset button, HDD LED and Power LED cables. They were app. 10 cm. too long, so I shortened them accordingly and sleeved them all together in one big piece of sleeving. Again, I have no shots of this - things were moving along REALLY fast at this point.



But I CAN show you a bit of the loop coming together.

I had ordered 3 metres of tubing. Turns out that 1 metre would have been more than enough. Go figure.



Installing tubing in such a small case with my big fingers had me slightly hate this build at this point....

Oh, and here you can also see where I installed the MicroRes. Just enough room for it between the CPU block and the PSU (7 days ago I would have said that there was PLENTY of room, but I've had some time getting used to NORMAL SIZED cases again, so I'm back to saying "just enough room").



Yeah, the toilet paper suggests that I'm just about ready for the big leak test.

And it began really well. I poured in some fluid, turned the pump on and off occasionally to fill the loop more and more. And things were moving along nicely.

But then, all of a sudden - SPLASH! Cooling fluid all over the place! I was like "WHAT the hell??? THAT much? Where'd it come from? Did I break an O-ring somehow? Did the reservoir break????"

And then, after poking about a bit, I realised something rather embarrassing - have a look at this picture:



See what I did there? (Or rather didn't do?) No? Come on, look at bit harder... you're almost there. Go on, you can do it. Juuust a little more looking arou...oh, **** it! I MISSED A GODDAMN STOP PLUG! Yeah, that's what missing 3-4 hours of sleep every night eventually will do to you as you REALLY want to finish the project and get it over with.

Missing stop plug installed - the loop filled just fine by then.

I changed the colour tone of the cooling fluid (which, by the way, is Mayhems Pastel Blue Berry) by adding 5-6 drops of Mayhems Blue Dye. In the following picture, you can see how I laid down one of the sleeved cables next to the tubing - just to see how close I could get the colour of the cooling to the colour of the blue sleeving. Details, details, details...



Have a look at that picture again. Noticed how I had to make a recess cut into the 5.25" bracket in order for the the top 140 mm. radiator to fit?

And now, allow me to quickly get the last few water loop pics off my chest, before I wrap this one up:









So, in case you were wondering, here's what went into this build:

Cubitek Mini ICE case
Intel i7-3770K CPU
Palit Geforce GTX690 graphics card
EKWB HF Supreme LTX CPU block
EKWB GTX690 VGA Full cover block
EKWB 13/10 mm black compression fittings
2 x EKWB Coolstream XT120 radiators
1 x HWLabs GTS140 radiator
Swiftech MCP35X pump
Swiftech MicroRes Rev 2 reservoir
PrimoChill 13/10 mm tubing
Various black 45 and 90 degrees swiveling fittings
Sony Optiarc BD-5850H Slot-loading BluRay Writer
Vantec Nexus NXP-205 fan controller
2 x Prolimatech Blue Vortex 120 mm fans
2 x Prolimatech Blue Vortex 140 mm fans
Silverstone Strider ST60F-P 600W PSU
Cool white LED strip + switch
OCZ Vertex 4 120 GB SSD
Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB SATA 6Gb/s HDD
Shakmods sleeving and heatshrink
2 x MNPCTech Black anodized billet fan grills
Various LEDs, solder, pain, acrylics, wiring, sleeving, blood, paint, MDPC-X P-clips, sweat, bolts, nuts (rounded), tears, washers and, occasionally: some really, really bad language!

In short: it's a little, nice power house. I wouldn't mind being given one, but I think I'll pass, if I had to build it for myself.

Hope you have enjoyed the show - here's a teaser for the batch of high res pics that you can download just below the teaser:



BabyShark by Hotmods.net - Final shots

Until next time, this is Nutman from Hotmods.net signing off.









(Ok, ok - not signing off. I still have some other worklogs to read, mind you)

 

This looks awesome! I like how you managed to do all those things inside this tiny chassis! Excellent job bro!

 

Thanks, Alex.

It was not easy and I fear that the coming owner will have a hard time replacing hardware in this build.

 

Nice, tidy & clean. Great job Nutman +1

 

Thanks!

Due to your +1, I'm now "a splendid one to behold".

 

Nutman, you just inspired me to make my own itx build with water happy smiles all over my faces all day long

 

Fantastic!

Let me know when you begin.

 

Machine's now for sale:

http://www.sharkgaming.dk/babyshark.html