Scratch Build – In Progress Dark Vortex - 11th May - Drive Rack, Lettering

Another Update

I have continued working on the case feet. I took my eight disks and glued them into pairs, with a bolt through each of the off centre holes, and then placed on my drying jig:


^ The drying jig is just four long screws in a block of wood, clamped to an iron L section (the same L section used for bending the motherboard back plate earlier)


^ This is one of the feet of the case glued together, it is the best formed, the others have a funny flowering patter in the joint caused by pressure, and then easing off pressure. As the disks will be frosted, this will not mater much.


^ The feet are now back onto the drying jig, this time with Araldite on the edges to fill in any small gaps that I had missed.


^ One of the essentials: my CD player...stops me going insane. The constant sound of filing can do that to someone


^ I also bought some more L section (10mm by 10mm) and another sheet of steel while I was out and about today



^ Two shots of the supporting bar on the base of the case for holding the two feet.

More tomorrow

 

very nice work, looking forward to a next update

 

The araldite on the feet is still drying, it is only slightly tacky now, and if I press it with my fingers I leave a print on the glue for a bit.

Time to do other things until the glue is dry enough for sanding.

Case Feet Brackets

So, what I want is the feet mounted about 60mm from the corners of the case, so I made two different brackets, one for the front of the case, and one for the back.


^ Two 60mm and one 96mm piece of L section.


^ Holes drilled in the ends, and screwed together.


^ Mounted in the case. The bracket is attacked in all four corners to the case, with the front two being attached to the frame and the rear two to the case floor.


^ The front bracket from the front view. The feet will be attached in the two corners of the bracket.


^ The read bracket is a similar idea, with the exception that the bracket is 140mm from the rear of the case. The feet will be attached about halfway down the bracket.

Hopefully the feet will have dried by tonight/tomorrow

Thanks, here you go

Comments welcome of course

 

Well as the araldite hasn’t cured yet I decided to make up a template for the front of my case tower. This will be used to hold in six 5 1/4 inch drive bays. The reason for making the mock up was to see if I could bend it in the smaller metalwork vice.


^ This is my card mock-up of the side of the front panel.


The cross section of the panel.

In the end I have decided to make a wooden Jig for bending the metal, as both sides of the can be bent using the same jig.

More tomorrow

Comments/Questions/Suggestions are always very welcome

 

Hey, quick tip:
For non textured frost in acrylic, go get some paint solvent from the hobby store, put a TINY amount on a rag, and rub away. I learned this the hard way with a model once, but I use it a lot now, it works quite nicely.

As always, test it on a scrap piece first, and wear mylar (impervious to the chemicals in solvent) gloves. You never know what might happen.

 

Looking good there, one question though, why steel, why not aluminum? Sure it's a bit cheaper, but you wouldn't have to worry about rust (there's a bit of it on the plates already ).

Of course if you're going with Piloux-style rust effect without the painting process...lol

Otherwise the mod's looking real good and it isn't going to be too small either, right? What are the planned dimensions on that bad boy?

Keep up the good work.

Janne

 

can't wait to see the final product, looks very good

 

Thanks, I think I have some paint solvent somewhere, so I will give that a try.

The reason for steel over aluminum, is that i have yet to find a cheap place for buying sheets from. There is a metal shop on the industrial estate near me that I will be going to check out, so hopefully they have some , oh and no to the rust effect!

The dimensions are 216mm x 525mm x 490mm (w x h d).

Thanks

 

Case Feet

I had an idea on how to attach the case feet to the case, with no need for tapping threads into the feet themselves. What I did was to drill the centre hole slightly larger on one side, specifically the same width as an M3 nut.


^ The nut is then placed onto the hole, and carefully hammered into the hole. As the hole is of the same diameter as the nut, the fit is tight and the nut does not turn freely. If it does of course, I can add some araldite to it.


^ All of the feet with inserted nuts, ready for their final sanding.


^ All sanded and the same size!


^ Top two feet test fitting, seems to be ok


^All mounted.

Next on the list of things to do is the top of the front bezel & 5 1/4 inch bays.

Comments welcome

 

looks very nice, but don't you think these can crack easily, I mean a small bump and it's gone. are you going to put a LED in each? (just an idea)

 

i hope it doesn't crack! well, it shouldn't at any rate.

and as for LEDs, that's what the extra 2 holes in each foot are for

 

Case Bezel

The case bezel that I am making at the moment is the most critical part, the CDROM bays. These need to be the exact right size (for obvious reasons) and so they are what I am doing first.


^ This is what this part of the front bezel will look like (hopefully).


^ This is the mould I will be using to bend the metal.


^ As I only have one mould, I used my camera’s mini tripod and took two photos and edited them together in Fireworks.

There are no photos of mid bend, but there are the results:





^ The longer edge (the side it is leaning on) will be the side against the CDROM bay, with the smaller edge screwed to the main chassis.

All that remains to be done on this piece of the bezel is to cut it to the correct height, file any sharp edges, and drill the mounting holes.

Tomorrow I will make the other panel for the Drives.

Comments welcome as usual

 

nice work, the bended piece looks very good!

 

Thanks


I didn't get too much done on this today, because I was finishing my Bench PSU Mod

 

Nice job on the bent sheet metal parts! Would you mind showing or telling us about your technique? 8D¨

 

One guide for you Gramps. I am also honoured to have you first post

As requested, a short guide on how I bend metal

First off I'll start with what tools I use.


^ A Large Hammer, And Square.
From Top to bottom:
A piece of wood
German Beech Mould
A piece of softwood
A Sheet of metal to be bent.

The piece of wood and the Mould are used to clamp the metal in the vice, and the second (the discoloured piece) is used for absorbing the hammer impacts, as to not dent the metal


^ This is the Vice setup I use. The mould is on the far side, followed by the metal, followed by a piece of wood. The mould and block of wood really need to be longer than the piece of metal to be bent, and when put in the vice, keep the tops level.

I also point out that you will need to take into account the thickness of the metal you are bending.


^ This is roughly how I work the length of my metal. The length of the long side you want is 20mm and the short side 5mm. You have 1mm thick metal, and thus I overlap my dimensions by 1mm, to allow for the thickness of the metal to make up the rest of the distance. NOTE: I always have a piece of metal too big in the direction of folding, so that I can trim off excess, and make the piece the exact correct length.


^ I start off the bend using the thin end of the softwood. You only need to behind the metal slightly, one or two hits of the hammer per area is generally fine. Work along the length of the metal to keep a consistent bend.


^ This is the angle I have ended up with after my first set of hits. A little too far bent over for a larger sheet of metal. As this is only a narrow bend, I will continue to bend the metal with the thin end of the softwood.


^ For a taller sheet of metal, I would now flip my softwood, and use the large flat side. This stops this happening:



^ The bend is now fully down onto the top of the mould, however it is not complete yet.


^ I would next use the thin end of the softwood along the corner of the metal. This is to help press the metal right into the corner of your mould, and thus end up with a cleaner 90 degree angle (this works with other angles too, obviously)


^ Next I flip the bend, so that the side we were hitting with the hammer & softwood is now in the vice, and the original held side of the join is exposed. This is then hit with the hammer & softwood to also help the angle form properly.


^ If the piece is the right size to fit into the smaller metal vice we have, I will finish the corner off on that. This is how the corner went into the vice.


^ And here we have it post flattening (Again using the hammer & softwood). All that remains to do is make sure the flat parts of your metal are properly flat.


^ One finished bend. The metal is not perfect, as I wrote the guide using a scrap piece I had lying around.

I hope this was useful to everyone

Questions and comments are welcome as always.

 

Great work with the bends! Somehow my metals always tend to bend from a wrong place... strange thing. I'll keep my eye on this Wish I had a warm garage to mod in, now I have neither garage or warm place except for my room.

 

Sweet! Thanx for the guide GuardianStorm!!

I've been considering getting a sheet metal bending bench thingy.. but with this guide and some practice I might be able to save thoose 200 EUR for other tools or building material.

 

Thanks

Thanks

If you look in the guide i posted in the Mod Guides Forum (link in my sig) there are a couple of cheap bending brakes:

US: http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=39103
UK: Here

 

Thanx again for the info! The UK link might come in handy should I need some tool I cant otherwise find easily here in Sweden.

The kind of bending break I was aming for earlier was the kind that has the removable segments, 'cause I'd like to be able to bend in two directions. I guess that I could just get the cheap bending break, bend the longest side and then use your method to bend in the other direction.
(The one I was aming for (klick the image for a bigger one): http://www.jula.se/Butik/docs/produkt.asp?OrderId=898779053&pf_id=SE-129650)

Nice to have some options in different price ranges to choose from when I start my first sheet metal bending project. ^_^

Btw.. sorry for filling your project log with all this! <=)