Case Mod - In Progress Gigantea-CM Elite 130 casemod-[Completed]

After staring at it for a while, I changed the motherboard mounting a bit. I decided to reduce it's height off the back plates and instead of adding a layer of acrylic to the tray, I just made the tray of acrylic. By switching to just the acrylic for the tray, I reduced some complexity and also made attaching the brackets to the plates a whole lot easier.



A 1" rise off the back plates instead of 2". Looks tighter and will help with some things in the future.



Next is the GPU. I thought mounting it would be a little tricky, but I turned out to be pretty straight forward. I had been thinking of ways to attach brackets to the backplate, but I didn't really like that idea since it would ruin the backplate for any future use. I've already hacked the I/O bracket on this card to pieces for the last build it was in, I really didn't want to ruin the setup any further. Since the backplate is held on with M3 screws, I decided I could use some M3 standoffs in their place and pretty much treat it like the motherboard, but with the standoffs reversed.

Pulled the backplate and added the standoffs.



Then I used the backplate for a template for my acrylic GPU tray.



Mounted to the GPU. It's got good clearance, so I'm not too worried about any heat build up.



And the GPU mounted with the same style of brackets I used on the MB tray.







With all the hard work done mounting these two, all that's really left for them is to frost the acrylic for the LED lighting and figure out some way to pretty up the brackets.

 

Update time!  I had a lot of things going on but I haven't forgotten about the giant.

First up, some storage.



I did want to pull the PCB's out and show them off, but they're tiny and different sizes, so I stuck with the standard enclosure.  I'm going to have to figure out an interesting finish for them to make them more...interesting.

In keeping with my backlighting of the MB and GPU, I'm mounting these on some 1/4" acrylic for backlighting as well.  A few of stand-offs.



And a couple of pieces of acrylic.



I wanted to come up with an interesting bracket to hold the drives out a bit.  I actually screwed the bracket up the first time and measured one side off the wrong line.  I played around with it a bit and made it work, and the end result was better than my original idea.



So far all the brackets I've done have been a little rough, and I was planning on going back to radius corners and such while working on paint and finishes, but now I'm thinking that I'll actually remake them with a little more flash in the design.  Same general idea, just prettier.  But getting on with things, mounted the SSDs.



This is also the start of the raceway for all my cabling.  

And then my new rads and fans came in.  I'd originally planned to use 120s, but the size just didn't work out for what my sections ended up being.  Way too big to look right.  So I went and got some 80mm fans and rads.  They're, dare I say, "cute".





They're tiny!  I'm hoping with 4, the loop will keep up with the CPU and GPU.

And mounted up with some temporary brackets.





All that's left is the PSU and then I can start fabbing parts for the body.

 

So I've got the CNC router up and going and mostly figured out. That means pretty aluminum parts!

Made some of the spiffy-ed up brackets so far. I'm using 5052 alloy so the bending goes easier.





And then bent them into shape.





Next up...the belly pans.

 

With the belly pan designs all mapped out, it's time to get really moving on things.



Lot's of tiny little hex cuts.  In retrospect, I should have either made them larger or smaller.  At their current size they leave a little tit that gets caught by the bit when you profile cut them.  Marks up the edges on some of them.  I tried pocketing the cuts but that wound up turning the 2.5 hours for a segment into 8+ hours.  I'll deal with a few nicks.

And the first one fresh off the router.





Now for a little bending magic.  Thank god I went with 5052, bends pretty nicely.







Talk about cutting it close on the second segment.  No waste except for the tons of shavings.



So far, two segments done and mounted.  The third is cut.  At 2.5 hours per, I think I know what I'm doing this weekend.  LOL.

 

Gotta stock up on sacrificial MDF, dude. You don't want to chop up your cnc's table. New panels came out great.
Not sure if this counts as using a CM case, though. Is there anything really left of them?

 

Thanks. Yeah, that's from the first couple of jobs I tried, gives it character. The foam tape holding the aluminum is keeping it up off the bed so it's safe for a while.

There's about 15 pieces from the original cases. I think the head and tail designs will make it more Cooler Master-y. I'm using the original front panels to make them and they're really the only thing that distinguishes the 130 from a box.

The way I see it, all they say is "it must be a Cooler Master case", and I'm using 3 CM cases, so I should really get bonus points.

 

I wanted to get a small update in before this weekend.  It's been hectic, we're moving my 'real job' shop and I've spent the last week trying to get new image hosting up and going.  Not sure how much work will be getting done on Gigantea this weekend, but on with the update.

I wound up hanging the whole thing from the ceiling in order to make working on the body sections a little easier and to begin working on the "case feet".





And speaking of case feet, some materials arrived.  If you've seen my Scout build, then you might have an idea of what's coming up.  But hopefully I've still got a few surprises.



Changing it up a bit from Scout, I needed to make some mounting points.  So I had to cut what felt like a thousand little parts.  Here are 20 plates and 20 tubes sections.  The arrows on the tubes mark the side that is the most square.  This will be important later on.



Drilling a thousand holes.  Ok, so it was only 80, but it felt like a thousand.



Once the holes were drilled, I stuck a plate together with a piece of tube in the vice.  I lined the square mark on my tube up with the vertical centerline of the plate.  I did this so that if there was a slight deviation from square, it would be in the horizontal plane and not the vertical.  Or in English, if I get all my measurements right, the legs might be a little off side to side, but they'll all be touching the ground.  And yes, I said legs.  Case feet are so mainstream anymore.  Every case has them.  But legs...  And to be honest, without legs, this thing would just be a giant worm, and that doesn't sound very cool.  But back to our vise...



You'll notice that one side of the vice only has a mounting screw in it instead of the normal jaw.  That's to reduce heat transfer to the vice.  I'm brazing these pieces together and keeping the vice from soaking up the heat makes things go so much easier.  After a lot of fire and some low temp brazing rods we wind up with this.



x 20.



And this is the crux of the giant centipede idea.  9 body sections seemed like a pain, but 18 legs and 2 jaws is just crazy.

Mounting some up and checking out how they're gonna work.





These are gonna give me some nice strong mounting points for the legs.  Also, since the square tube that I'm using for the actual leg is sized to just slip over the round tube on the mounting points, I've got rotational adjustment to make things sit nice and it's only going to take a set screw to lock the legs in.  A bonus to this set up is that if I want to cart a 3 foot by 3 foot giant centipede case around the country, I can pull the legs off to make it a little easier.

While I've been running the cnc router like crazy to get the body panels made, I snuck in my radiator brackets.





I'm a little worried about airflow considering all the cabling and tubing running between each pair of rads.  But I've still got a lot of adjustment with switching the rads and fans around, push vs. pull, and even the ability to angle them slightly so I should be able to make it work out in the end.

 

Wow! What a crazy week last week! We sold our building that we run our plumbing shop out of and had to move EVERYTHING to a new building. It's amazing how much stuff we accumulated in the past 10 years in that building. Needless to say, I didn't get much done on Gigantea. It didn't help that I broke a belt on the CNC router last weekend. Is it just SOP for things like that to break with 5 minutes left of a 2 hour run rather than 5 minutes into a 2 hour run? So this weekend was all about getting the router up and going again and making headway on this crazy project.

The CNC router was a easy fix, just replace a belt, but while I was at it, I went ahead and made a spoilboard of 3/4 MDF and surfaced it so it was nice and level. Musical track for this portion...The Raconteurs "Level".



I had noticed that it fell off a bit going to the back right. Just a hair, but when your making .005 cuts, a hair is enough to be a problem. While doing this, I noticed that my spindle was a bit out of level front to back as well. It's not a big issue now since I'm just making profile cuts, but that's the next fix.

With the router going on Gigantea's next body section, it was time to make some case feet. Or rather case legs. Track for this portion...ZZ Top's "Legs".

Let's start off with some 1" square aluminum tube.



Cutting aluminum with my bandsaw is tricky. The single speed it runs is really too fast for aluminum and melts the Al into the teeth. To cure this problem I brought home a new friend. Meet Mr. Portaband.



If you've never run into one of these before, it's a portable bandsaw. Great for cutting stuff that you just can't put on a bandsaw. We bought it years ago for cutting iron pipe and all-thread rod but never really used it much. It's just been collecting dust. The great thing about it, for me at least, is that it has a slow running speed for cutting metals. It made quick work of my aluminum tubing. One note, being in construction you pick up some bad habits. Smoking, cussing, improvising tool stands. So yes, that is pretty dangerous power tool clamped in a vise. Don't try this at home kiddos.

I used a piece of bailing wire to get an idea of the angles and length I wanted for the legs. I mocked up a 12" leg with two 45 degree bends, but it wasn't quite right. Did some re-figuring of the angles and around 30 degrees looked perfect. So lets start hacking the aluminum.



After it's appointment with Mr. Portaband and in the vise for a little bit of heat. Using a propane torch, I just heated where I wanted the Al to bend and used a pair of pliers to manipulate the part. The spires at the top all get bent in to form a point and the V cutouts will give me the angles in the legs.





Perfect. The joints will be brazed and ground down for more strength, but this is a good start.

Now just to mark up the rest of the legs.





This is never going to end...

For the first batch I did 10 legs.



These are going to be the legs on the ground and an extra pair reaching out. I've got something special planned for the rest of them. I couldn't resist and had to stick these 10 on. They aren't pushed all the way on their mounts because I still need to sand a little on the round tube to get it to easily fit in the square. This setup, along with a set screw I plan on adding, lets me adjust the legs' angles and even remove them if I want. Track for this portion...ZZ Top "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide".





Definitely happy with where this is heading and with my progress this weekend. And the weekends not even over yet, so back to work. Next log we'll hopefully be listening to ZZ Top's "Tush" and "My Head's In Mississippi".

Thanks for playing along!

 

It's time for the Weekend Update!  Woo hoo!  What have I been up to this week?  Keep reading to find out!

Let's start at the top.  Because the head's at the top and that's what I was working on.  Musical track to accompany this portion...Basement Jaxx "Where's Your Head At?"  Which incidentally, has a crazy, weird, monkey based video.

And to answer, my head is on the router table.



This was original go at the head section but I missed subtracting the horizontal dimension of the angle, so it turned out to be a nice shiny piece of cut aluminum.



After a quick adjustment and re-cut I wound up with this.





The three empty holes on the angle part will be filled with LED's for it eyes, because, well, if they didn't glow, it would be disappointing.

While I was re-working the details of the head and waiting another couple of hours for it to cut, I finished up the legs that I had cut and bent last time.  Musical selection for this part...Donna Summer "Hot Stuff"

This was definitely some hot stuff.  Brazing the joints of the legs and also the tips.





The tips look pretty rough and that's mainly because the joints are a bit too wide to braze well, and I'm not the best at brazing.  But I wasn't too worried about it since I mainly just wanted some of the gaps filled so that it would be easier to apply filler on them later.

After some touch up with a die grinder.



Before marrying the legs up to my mounts and the body, I decided to back up my brazing with some epoxy in the mounts.  Never hurts to play it safe.  This sections track...Men Without Hats "Safety Dance", because we can dance if we want to.



Next step was to mount the mounts.



My idea with the mounts and the legs was to be able to adjust or remove the legs, so we need some holes for the set screws.



And now Gigantea can stand on it's own.





I figured this would be a great time to see if all my planning would stand up to the weight of the system, so lets throw some components in.  Music for this section...anything by Led Zepplin, cause it's heavy man!

Booty shot!



The nice part of having legs pretty much everywhere is that it allows you to set the case in a lot of different positions to reach the hard to get to parts.  First rad set in and the second on the way.





Looking down the belly of the beast.



The components in their homes.









The two way mirrored acrylic on the PSU makes it a little hard to tell what's going on when it's off, but it should look nice lit up in there.



Another booty shot to 'end' on...

 

Pictures, i believe, do not do this build justice!
Would very much like to see this in person to get a more realistic feel of the shape and size...

Looking weird - in a good way

 

Thanks! Yeah, I need to get a picture standing next to it to give it more of a sense of scale. Right now it's sitting just under 4 feet long and around 3 feet tall.

 

Time to invest in some nerf balls for the front legs. They look to be at eye level... and stabby.

-Also, You are crazy!

 

Totally and utterly bat droppings mad. As mad as a box of frogs.

I love it

 

Thanks! I've never been called mad as a box of frogs...I like it!

The front legs are switching up a bit so eyeballs wont be in danger. I really wanted them to be reaching out, but I need that pair for something else.

Figured I'd get some pics to give a sense of scale. At the moment Gigantea is 37" tall, 21" wide, and 46" long and straightened out would be over 6 feet long tip to tail.

For comparison I stuck it next to an upcoming project case, a Fractal Define R4.





But that wasn't a fair comparison, so I went with a pair of R4's.





After moving it around for these shots, I think it's definitely getting a stand. Those mounts are getting tweaked pretty hard and I just don't know how long the braze joints will take the abuse.

 

I think you are a few legs short there.

 

All in good time.

 

UPDATE TIME!!!!!

It feels like I'm slowly plodding along, but I'm to the point where I can make a list of things to do. Definitely better than the "OMG there is sooo much to do!" feeling.

First off, I'll start with the back armor. Giant centipedes have it. Every evil robot who knows anything about being an evil robot has it. So Gigantea has it!

I've had an idea of what the back armor would look like from the beginning, but I wanted to test it out to see that it made sense for looks and in function in the semi-reality where Gigantea would exist. Break out the paper!



It's going to slightly overlap and the bends in the spine are going to be interesting. I might have to cut them down a bit so it looks right. After a bit of work in SketchUp, I cut out a few of them from some 1/8" acrylic. It gives them some bulk but will still be easy to bend.





Haven't gotten around to bending them and figuring out the mounting yet. Mainly because of what's next...Reservoir Time!

If you've kept up, you're probably wondering where the heck are you going to mount a reservoir on this thing? It's stuffed pretty full.

How right you are! There are a few spots a bay res might fit, and space for a custom reservoir, but not really a spot for a 200mm tube res with a D5 on the bottom. Hmmmm...well let's check out the res.



One of Monsoon's new MMRS setups. Very pretty with the frosted reactor tube. The standard mounting brackets don't really help me, but they do hold the lighting kit for the res, 2 CCFL bulbs. So we'll be keeping those.



What I will be using to mount this are the extra holes tapped into the top and bottom of the res that allow you to offset their mounts.



This is all fine and dandy but where's it going? Well, since there isn't a good mounting spot, Gigantea is just going to have to hold it, lol.

I wanted it to look like it had just found this amazing item and it was holding it up. So we need to customize some legs. I had to pull them in tighter so it would look like they were actually holding the res.



Almost, just need to cut some of the angles a bit more.



Pretty close!

I cut the tips of the legs off and drilled a hole for the M4 screws to go through.



Once you slip the screw in through the base of the leg, the threads pop out, but the leg holds the head. It's a total pain to screw together since you have to use pliers on the threads, but it works well and I'm not planning on taking it apart too often.

And the finished product.





And a closeup of the mounting.



Still a lot left to do, but I'm so happy that this worked out like I pictured it in my head!

 

More progress! I finally got the body sections and legs finished up!

I had most of the body sections done, but ran into a tight spot at the bend by the head and the design had to be tweaked at bit. An extra angle in a couple of pieces and shortening another section got it to work together.





It's a pretty tight spot and Gigantea claimed it's first victim, my knuckle.



But I did get a preview of how the blood red I'm planning on using will look.



Trying to fit the last 4 legs and 2 jaws in that little space with the 2 legs that were already there was a nightmare. I definitely feel for centipedes after this, getting all those legs to work together. Of course they have a socket joint at the body which would have made my life a whole lot easier. Since I'm not getting that crazy, I had to play around with angles and positioning to fit all 8 limbs in that tiny space.







It's an eye poking hazard.



All that was left were the jaws. I figured I'd show you the progress of how I make one of these. After figuring out the angles I want and cutting sections out with a bandsaw, I'll throw it in the vice and grab the torch.



I start at the top just because that's the easiest time to bend the point. Applying the torch to the base of the prong, I'll take some pliers and apply pressure until it starts to get soft. Then you just squeeze the prong in and work your way around all four of them, bringing them to a point. After that, I'll use the pliers to grab the top and hit the back side of the notches with the torch.



And then you just apply some pressure till it bends right over.



And you get this, ready to have it's joints brazed.



With these jaws done, it was time to finish up the limbs.



With 8 limbs all on top of each other, there really isn't a camera angle that makes it make any sense, especially with everything all shiny aluminum right now. IRL, it's a little easier to follow what's going on, and I think paint will help too.



I will say, in person, it looks like something you don't want to mess with.

Next up is the back armor. I cut my original pieces down a bit to where they cover the body sections but don't overlap. It just made life easier working around the bends in the body. But while drilling and tapping mounting holes, this happened.



My 6-32 tap just couldn't handle it. And I didn't have any luck in getting the tip out. It's about impossible to drill cause it's hardened and I really can't go after it without risking breaking something. Once I disassemble everything for finishing, I'll either set it up and drill it out in a drill press or take a punch and put it through. And if neither of those plans work, I'll just fake a screw top. It's one of 4 screws holding a piece of 1/8" acrylic so it's really for looks anyways.

Since my 6-32 tap was dead and not really cut out for tapping this bar, I jumped my screws up to M4 and mounted my pieces of acrylic.



Then I grabbed my trusty heat gun.



With a little heat application, I bent the armor pieces to give me a contour between the spine and the sides of the body sections.



I'm still debating on bending the little winged edges down. That was my original plan, but I think leaving them alone looks alright. At least for now.

Thanks for following along!

 

Tiny update. Got the armor completed!







That's pretty much it for fabrication except for the head and tail sections and some stands. Speaking of stands, had a little accident that reinforced the need for them. While moving Gigantea to the floor so I could work actually reach what I was working on, a leg joint braze gave out. Luckily, the aluminum is sturdy enough to take some abuse. So, after fixing that, I started on the stands.

I planing on taking some 5/16 threaded rod and threading one end into the spine, the other into small bases. I'm just planning on these to hold weight and not balance the whole thing, so they don't have to be very big. Luckily I ordered some thicker plastics to play around with so I've got a selection of 12"x12"x.5" acrylics and HDPE.



Since I've never worked with HDPE, I figured I'd give it a go. The snow white is not really useful, hopefully it will paint well.



Speaking of snow, this stuff leaves nice fluffy white chips EVERYWHERE!



And the bases are cut out. 6" round, or as round as my router will make them. I need to look into that, but for Gigantea, angled polygons aren't that far out of line since it is covered with a thousand hexagons. This is the bottom side, you can see the pockets for the nuts and washers to sit in.



Once I get everything disassembled for finishing and paint, I'll put some holes in the spine for the threaded rod and get the stands put together. Thankfully, finishing and paint is next!

 

Little update on what's going on. Got it all disassembled and ready to prep for paint. I think this thing has about a million screws in it.



Using filler to clean up the legs.







Why did I make something with 20 legs?!? Another final coat of filler to catch some spots that got missed and these will be ready for primer.

Most everything else has gone through a quick sand and is ready for primer as well, so it's time to get painting!