Scratch Build – In Progress Project: Der_Meister - custom alu case *Epilogue Nov 8th, 2007*

Why you just have not painted the MoBo-Tray black?!?

Looks nice anyway so far

 

because I don't need to

and because I hate to paint. Really really really hate to paint

 

First assembly – part two (aka mobo tray and panel phase two)

Time to put that mobo panel in!

Here’s where I left it, I mounted it with some tape for the time being. I also drilled and cleaned the mounting holes in the black panel:


A while later, not bad for a first fitting:


Now, I needed some space between the frame and the mobo panel, to make mounting everything easy, and because the 80mm fan that will go next to the mobo doesn’t have too much space as it is. So I put a nut on every bolt, in between the mobo panel and the bars that it is mounted on:


This was a pain in the a** to mount, since the nuts kept tightening. There is very little space as you can see in the previous pic, I had to find another solution. Let me come back to that in a minute.

Anyway, the tray –remember it was just taped on- fitted almost perfectly. This was a nice surprise, since I expected to have to do quite a bit of adjustments
This is the backside, look how perfectly it rests against the back panel of the case:


So I took the whole thing back out of the case. I drilled holes in the tray and panel to mount them together. Just straightforward drilling, no pics of that.

Also, even though I already put some spacers, I needed to cut a part of the edging of the mobo tray off to have enough room to mount the 80mm fan later on. I did that with help of my Black&Decker rotary tool (Dremel-wannabe). Here’s the result:


And here she is, all mounted. I like the look of this very much and am very pleased with this result:


One of my favorite pics so far. You can see the recessed tray here. The standoffs lift the mobo up high enough so every connector etc stays clear of the M4 bolts that are used to mount the tray to the panel.


And the backside. I will of course shorten those bolts. You can see how little space I had at the bottom of the tray, the bolts and nuts are really close to the edge. This pic also gives a good view of the part of the edge I cut away to accommodate for the 80mm fan later on:


Remember the nuts I used as spacers. Well, I attacked them with the dremel-wannabe and removed their threads. They had a perfect heigth, that’s why I didn’t bother making spacers myself or looking for another solution:


The panel mounted again in the case. With the new spacers, mounting was easy. The PCI section seems to be away from the back panel, but this is because the whole upper portion of the tray tends to bend a bit (has to do with the original construction of the LianLi tray). It’s okay when it’s mounted completely.


Fast forward a bit. I drew the cuts to be made and mounting holes to be drilled. I made the cuts and drilled the holes. ‘Nuff said, by now you guys know how it goes. Here’s the result:


I put the panel back on the case and mounted the mobo tray to it. I used M3 bolts. The cut was okay, not my best ever, but good enough:


At this point, I wish I could say ‘project finished’, but it’s not. The LianLi tray is not finished very well. Every corner is open, like this:


I agree that that’s not really a problem. Maybe I’m not going to do anything about that, it will depend how much energy I’ve got left at the end of the ride.
The other problem is the one I mentioned a few posts ago: the short side piece of the PCI slot section is on the plate I removed from the tray:


This is quite an ugly opening. I think you’ll agree on this. It’s just a matter of glueing a strip of aluminium to it though. I’ll fix this at the end of the mod, when I’ll finish off every small bit I’ve got left.

So, that’s a big part of the first assembly that’s finished. I also mounted the two plates for the optical drives, but they’re not in their final position, need to mount them to the optical drives first.

Next post is the last bits of the first assembly: hard disc area and pump plate.

 

First assembly – final part

In this final post of the first assembly, let’s start with the mounts for the hard drives. They are stainless steel pieces that are normally used for furniture and other construction. Here you see two of them mounted:


I needed to have sturdy mounts because with the silentmaxx encasings, my hard drives weigh almost 2kgs each! Here they are all mounted with an old cd-writer positioned as a test. It works perfectly. There is enough room between the mounts of the top and bottom drives to get their bolts in, I made sure of that:


And a final close-up of the top four mounts:


Another thing I made was the pump plate.
It is mounted with rubber standoffs in order to kill vibrations. I’m going to use these rubber thingies in a number of places throughout the case. They are not metric size, but they work well with M4 bolts. Here’s what they look like:


And here they are mounted between the pump plate and the frame:


This is a global pic of the pump plate by the way:


I also test mounted the ‘fake bottom’ I made, it fits like a glove:


Last but not least, the covers for the hard drive area. Remember the two supports I made for the three panels that cover the hard drive section? Well, here’s one of them bended in the right position.


And here they are mounted. Like I said before, I’m expecting these to be too weak to hold the weight of the panels when they have silencing material attached to them and when there are some cables that put pressure. Oh well, we’ll see when we get at that stage of the building process:

And another:


Here I was testfitting the three panels. I needed to do some filing here and there, I made them a big too big on purpose:


And another one:


I filed the panels down to the size they needed to be and testfitted them untill I was satisfied. Now they look very nice when mounted. There’s obviously still a lot of work to do on them: making a hole in the top one to fit mesh, making holes to guide the cables in and out. As you can see in the last pic, I have a sufficiently big area between the two vertical plates to guide a lot of cables!

First assembly was finished after mounting these panels. I then started on the hole for the PSU…as I’ll show you in the next post!

 

Power Supply Sweetness!

Here are some pics of the PSU and making the hole and mounts for it.

First of all, I love the PSU I bought. It’s a Superflower 500W PSU. I took some pics of it that I want to show you guys. It’s absolutely quiet and looks superb! It’s a kind of ‘titanium’ look and will fit in perfectly.


This is an 140mm fan, blue leds, and amazingly quiet. At the back there’s a button for the fan speed with three settings (always most quiet possible, always at max. speed, in between). The inside is nicely stuffed, lots of thick wire, thick heatspreaders. In short: looking sweet:


It’s ready for the new 2.03 standard. As well as the old standard. The extra 4 pins rotate away, as you see here. Also, the sleeving is very nice:


The PSU is modular. What I like about this one is that it has a dedicated line for a videocard, both in old style (4-pin molex, extra shielding, perfect for me) and for a pci-express card:


Here’s a pic of the connector section. I had to rotate it since I didn’t realise it was upside down when I took the photo, pretty stupid huh. It total, the psu has 10 4-pin molex connectors, which is actually the main reason I bought it.


And here’s the box, for those that might be interested:



Now, to the actual modding

First step was of course as always: drawing out everything. I almost made two mistakes, but the measure twice-rule came to the rescue. Because the back of the PSU is almost completely made of mesh, I needed the hole to be as big as possible. So only the notches were left. This meant drilling a lot of pilot holes. Here it is right after the drill and jigsaw treatment:


And after a while…the result. The lines are all straight even though the pic makes them look a bit off here and there. Two of the mounting holes needed to be enlarged as they were not exactly in the right position.


PSU mounted. As you can see, I’m using a rubber spacer to damp vibrations. The PSU is mounted with thumbscrews. Its mounting holes are not metric, and I had these screws lying around:


A look from the inside. The whitish rubber will not be visible, so I don’t have to do anything about it. It should be clear now why I’m using two backplates on the case: to get the PSU out of the case, I just get the whole top backplate off. Like that, I don’t need to make sure I can get the PSU out from the inside or that it can slide out or whatever.


A final thing to do was to ‘mod’ the rubber spacer a bit. For this I just used a pair of scissors, they cut very easily through the material:


And that’s all. I am going to make an internal support for the PSU, but for that I need a long and narrow strip of alu. I’ll make it when I cut out most of my panels, I drew out where I’m cutting what and I’ll have a nice piece where I can cut the strip from later on.

On to the top panel for three projects: radiator, top access hatch for optical bay and fillport!

 

Radiator

You guys probably saw this 100s of times already. But for me it’s all pretty new. So I’m going to do one post about the mod for the radiator.

I’m using a 2x120mm rad, Airplex Evo by Aqua Computer. It goes in the back uppersection of the case. I’m also using the Aqua Computer fan grill for it. First a sketch of this project:


As you can see in the sketch, I’m not just going to put the rad in, grill on top of the case and that’s it. No, I’m going to make a piece in black alu that will surround the grill, and I’m also making a piece in UV plexi that will be sandwiched between the case and the grill & black alu. The silver/black/UVplexi is a theme that will be used throughout a lot of the outside mods of the case.

To the pics then. This first one shows the hole already cut out. At first I made it with rounded edges, but I made them square afterwards. It’s a matter of allowing the fans to sit directly underneath the grill.


Here I was starting on the black alu. In the next pics, it looks like I’m using a dark grill, but it’s the regular stainless steel one. Bad lighting on those pics, sorry.
Before cutting:


After the cut and before filing, you can see where I’m going:


And this one is after filing and rounding the edges. This is a very tedious job, and I’m facing more of this (coverplate for Aquatube in front panel). But the result is looking really well! The Aqua Computer grill is also 2mm thick, so it’s nice and even with the black alu.


Finally a pic with some better (day)light. Here it is positioned on the case:


The black alu makes the transition of rounded corners to straight corners. This is the main reason I’m doing this, I first made my sketches with the rounded edges and it just didn’t look right compared with the rest of the case. The same thing applied for the coverplate of the Aquatube in the front panel. I showed it to some friends and they all agreed. One of them asked if the grills exist with squared edges or if I could make the transition. And so I got this idea. I like the result.
‘SPOILER’ When I’m writing this, I’ve just finished the shroud for the front panel section that contains the Aquatube, and the result there is even better than here since that panel also contains the openings for the dvd-drives (all straight cornering). ‘/SPOILER’

At this point, I drilled the mounting holes for the grill and shroud. Mounting the shroud with 6 bolts was inspired by the grill (see next pic).


And:


And this one to show that the grill and shroud have the same thickness:


I then started on the plexi panel that is going to be sandwiched between case and grill/shroud. I’m using AC Ryan plexi on this case: smoked and UV blue. I’m also going to use some regular acrylic, that’s a left-over from another project. Anyway, the AC Ryan stuff is all 3mm thick. I have to say that the UV blue doesn’t glow as much on the edges as the UV green for example. But that is no problem, in fact it’s better for this project. The plexi is nice and easy to work with, I’m quite happy with my choice. Only one complaint: for some reason AC Ryan doesn’t put a protective plastic on it, so you need to tape off the whole thing.

I cut out the plexi with my jigsaw. Then I file it down in exactly the same way I file down the aluminium, only difference is that I start with a rougher file.
Here it is filed down to size (outside):


And after all the filing and drilling the mounting holes:


The final result. The bolts are only halfway in, I needed to enlarge the holes in the plexi somewhat. Pics are bad, sorry.


And one from the side:


The plexi doesn’t give any glow at this point. It’s a lot better when it’s sanded and polished. I don’t have any pics of that since at the time, I didn’t have wetsanding sandpaper and acrylic polish. In my post about the fillport, I’ll have some nice pics about this process.
First I’m making a small post about the access hatch for (un)mounting the optical bay though. I need to sort out the pics of the fillport-mod.

Oh and one last thing: it’s not forbidden to leave a comment in my discussion thread…j/k, I know it’s all stuff that’s finished already, but still it is awfully quiet in the thread…

 

Wow man! I like how this is turning out, it's soo clean cut and well done some far, keep it up!!!

 

I need your opinion!!

I have to leave the planned order of my posts of work that’s already done, this is a call for help to anyone who reads this!
This shows I’m catching up to where I actually am with the mod

In short: I’m going to build a panel that contains all the buttons, switches and the usb ports for this mod. There will probably also be two leds for the dvd-drives but I didn’t include them in my sketches yet. The panel measures 148x90mm.

I’ve got two buttons for power and reset (Bulgin – blue led) and two buttons for my dvd-drives (no leds, otherwise same look as Bulgins though).
I’ve got six switches, but in two series of three. One series is bigger than the other. Five switches will be used for control of the lighting, the sixth one for the Psone screen.
Finally, there’s a 4-port USB panel. That’s actually a PCI-bracket that I’m going to mod.

Now, I had some ideas about the lay-out, and I just made a sketch of all of them. I had almost 20 lay-outs, but narrowed it down to 10 for this post
Problem is that I like quite a few of them and I cannot choose between them. So please, give your opinion on the lay-out you like best. I hope a lot of you respond and help me make up my mind.

Before I show you the sketches, two remarks.
One: I quickly made these sketches and not everything is lining up perfectly and at equal distance, also the usb-thing is showing through. I know this, but I didn’t have the time to spend on it to make all these lay-outs perfect. I think it’s clear what I’m going for in every sketch. You also see the difference between the Bulgin (blue circle) and non-bulgin and between the bigger and smaller switches I hope. The final design will of course be properly sketched.
Two: I am going to make a label to stick to the panel, to indicate what the buttons and switches are there for. Again, this will take up time. I couldn’t make 15 of them. So imagine that there has to be some room for adding text etc…I think it’s quite possible to make a decent label for all the versions below, but some would be much easier than others.

THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR REPLYING! If you feel inspired and want to suggest your own lay-out, go ahead. Or if you want to suggest small changes to one of the lay-outs, let’s hear it!

To the sketches!

Version 1

This was my first idea. I added a first start for a label to it. As you see, there would a rammstein-logo as ‘watermark’ behind the switches. But the switches would be very close to eachother and to the top edge/usb ports. Moreover, I’m using the R+ logo in different other places (at least once on the front panel) and I think it could (would?) be overkill. So quite a few problems with this version actually. Two leds for the dvd-drives can go next to the usb-panel.



Version 2

One switch is far from the others, the one for the Psone screen. The five others are for the lighting. Power and reset button are far from eachother. The row of five switches doesn’t leave much space for text labels though.



Version 3

Only a small difference with version 2. There’s a lot more space for labels for the row of switches.



Version 4

Something totally different. Here the size difference between the three swithes on the left and the ones on the right plays. I could mix them.



Version 5

A variant of version 1 that makes better use of the available space.



Version 6

Only a small change from version 5, but this makes a difference in look. For this one, it would be nice if I could group the functions of the switches pairwise (which is more or less possible).



These were the ones I like most. I’m including 4 more though, that are not too bad either.


Version 7

Mostly a different lay-out of the buttons.



Version 8

I experimented with the position of the usb-panel. This is one of the most interesting results. Seeing it now, I think the bigger switches would look better on the right (bottom one for Psone lcd). The two leds that could be added, would have to go between the buttons in this version.



Version 9

Another experiment with the usb-hub. It would be handier of that stays at the bottom though, but the two rows of switches widening out could be nice as well with the usb-hub at the bottom.



Version 10

Finally something completely different. I experimented with diagonals as well. Not too satisfactory though, except this one. Thing is that I don’t really know what to think of this one.


That’s it. Thanks for the help!

 

I'd prefer a mix between Version 4 and version 7. That is, the flip-switches in two straight rows as in v7, and the round ones in the middle in a square as in v4.
(just my 0.2€)

 

5 or 7 i liked most^^

 

I liked #1 best

 

great work

i like the buttonlayout from number 4, but id try to put in the rammsteinlogo in between the 4 vandalswitches
version 7 is also nice

 

I like version 5. Perhaps you could put a poll up for others to vote on?

 

1 or 5

 

I like 5,7,9 those are my Opinions.

 

hey, nice piece of work, i am voting fo unusal No10, 1st and 7th are good too


good luck

 

I have to say version 5... and I also couldn't understand how you haven't gotten any stars yet, so... I remedied that! Nice work so far man!

 

I want to thank you guys for all the replies. I had this running at both bit-tech and wizdforums and here are the results:

Version 1 was chosen 3 times,
Version 3: 1 time,
Version 4, 2 times,
Version 5: 9 times,
Version 7: 9 times,
Version 9: 2 times,
Version 10: 1 time.

That’s pretty obvious
So it was a tie between 5 and 7, and I decided to go for 7. I think it was chosen by all of you because it’s something non-standard. Besides, I think it’s better for designing a suitable label for it, I can even squeeze in a rammstein-logo watermark behind the vandal switches.

I made up the final design for it in Sketchup. Here it is:

I mixed up the switches a bit, two bigger at the left side with a smaller in between and two smaller at the right side with a bigger in between. I like it better this way, and it’ll come in handier to group them by function. Also, now there’s a smaller switch next to the left blue vandal (which will be the power button), which is again a bit handier.

Finally, the two new circular things next to the usb-hub are a rough version of two chrome led holders. I’ll fit in the activity leds for the optical drives there. I put them in line with the switches vertically and in line with the bolts for the usb-panel horizontally. Like this, I have two sections in the whole panel: buttons & switches vs. usb & leds. Maybe I can do something with it in my label design. I tried to space the switches & leds evenly on the vertical axis, but that just didn’t look right because the middle switches were not aligned with the blue bulgins anymore.

Oh and in case you’re wondering while there are only three sides to the panel, that’s because of space constraints in the case. You’ll see what I mean soon.

Again, thanks a lot. I think this is a very suitable design. You guys did a good job, respect!
As a reward, I’ll post a mega-update for you tomorrow!

 

thanks

 

Access hatch to optical bay

This is a small project, I need to make an opening in my top panel to be able to mount and unmount the optical bay. I could have probably constructed that optical bay otherwise and eliminate the need for the opening, but then my top panel would have been really empty. The opening will be covered by a ‘hatch’ made of black alu. For the moment, in my design and mind the hatch will be sober (no labels or anything), but that could change once I see how it looks without tape etc.

Let’s start with a sketch:


This pic shows the complete top panel, with the dimensions of the opening and hatch drawn out, pilot holes drilled and one side already cut. Think away this opening and I’m sure you’ll agree the top panel would have been empty, right?


One of the most rewarding things on the construction of the case is the result after filing, from this:


To this:


Next up was making the black alu panel. Normal procedure here, here you see it lying where it’s supposed to:


It was at this point I started to wonder how the final look would be if the edges of all the black alu panels would also be black instead of filed down normal alu color. I would like to try it out later on, once I can remove some tape here and there. But: I don’t want to start painting. Do you guys have other solutions? Maybe a permanent black marker? But will that hold? Any opinions on this greatly appreciated!

Final step: drilling and tapping mounting holes:


Followed by a test mounting:


I was quite happy with this small project. It was a nice change from all the bigger stuff I was doing. Fast, easy, nice result. That was about to change again