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

Fillport part one

Next project I did was the fillport area. This will be a post in two parts. The reason is I want to cut down on the pics of cutting and filing and drilling, but also on the pics of sanding and polishing plexi. I have some very nice pics about all this for this project. Therefore, I’m going to post them here with some explanation here and there, and after this I’m only going to post a few pics about this process per project. This will make my posts less repetitive

A sketch of what I’m about to do:


The start of this project is I’ve never done before, and also something I’ll never do again! Let me explain why. The Danger Den Fillport needs a hole of about an inch. I wasn’t looking forward to making a nice circular hole with drill and files, and I don’t have a holesaw. Or do I?
*enter cunning plan*
I had some old thing lying around, it was some kind of hole-saw but I suspected it to be for wood. It was just the right size though. So I tested it on a scrap piece of alu and it worked like a charm. Highly motivated by that I decided to attack my top panel. I had marked the hole to be cut from the inside of the panel using the fillport as a guide.
*applying cunning plan*
I started drilling and about halfway through the hole saw started living a life of its own. It literally slipped away. Since the damage was already done at that point I just pushed on the drill and drilled all the way through.
From the topside, it was –much to my surprise- pretty clean. If only my camera would have worked with me, I would have a decent pic:


But the other side was not so pretty:


So actually I was pretty lucky to have marked out the hole on the underside, unlike I mostly do. You’ll see in the end of this project that the plexi tightener of the fillport covers this mess up completely.
The holesaw itself was another issue. Some of its teeth were bent. My best bet is that it was a wood saw of some kind, got heated a lot (too much?) from my test run and then gave in when I did the hole right after the test run, so before it could cool down. I don’t know and frankly I didn’t care either.

I didn’t care because the job was done and it was okay: fillport fitted right where it was supposed to:


Also on the underside, no problems:


That was quite a relief!
After that, I started on the black alu coverplate. That also needed a circular hole, but this time I took the old-skool road. I drilled holes until I could push out the middle part:


And then I started filing. And you know what? That went super fast and super smooth. After about 20 mins I was already done with it. I couldn’t believe it either, I guess I must have been in the right mood!

At that point I realized something was wrong. Not with the panels, but with the colour-scheme. You see, I had a black fillport. With a black alu cover around it. But all the rest of the watercooling stuff (and most other panels) are stainless steel/normal alu with a black cover around them.

The solution was obvious: time for a dual-color fillport
After a little sanding:


The black came off nicely…here it is after rough sanding:


And surrounded by the black alu cover, partially done:


After cutting and filing the black alu plate:


I don’t know bout you guys, but I just love this look of the fillport. I find it a very big disappointment that I will have to close it off later on.

Since this is one of the water-cooling projects, it needs a plexi part that’s sandwiched between case and black alu cover. Again, AC Ryan’s UV blue plexi is used. First of all, the hole for the fillport. Here it is already drilled out a filed to a roughly suitable shape, fillport passes through without a problem:


And a final shot of part one, just the plexi:

 

Fillport part two

Okay, on with this project!

Before I started on finishing the plexi, I worked on sanding the fillport to a more respectable level. The original sanding that you saw in the previous post was done with a 120 grit and a 200 grit metal sanding paper. Now, I continued with a 320 grit and then a 600 grit paper. I finished with a 1000 grit paper. The result:


And another:


Looks nice huh
Actually, in real life (and if you look very closely at the last pic) there are a few tiny scratches remaining. I needed to give it a wetsanding but didn’t have any wetsanding paper left at the time. I bought it the day after to finish my plexi, but somehow the fillport still isn’t done at the time I’m typing this (about two months later). It’s on the ‘to do’ list, don’t worry…

So, time to finish the plexi. Like I said in the previous post, I’m going to post the whole thing here (except for wetsanding-in-progress since I didn’t take them) and going to be quick about in in later posts.

Here’s the finished panel, I just sanded that with 200 grit to get rid of the markings of the filing process:


It’s the right size…always double check everything before starting with the sanding (it’s boring and takes a while, so no point in having to do double work). I keep the tape on because the plexi has some uses later and I don’t want to scratch it too much. This is the main reason why you won’t see a lot of blue glow on it in the following pics. It is there, take my word for it.


After sanding to 600 grit, you can almost see through it. The blueness is showing on the edges:


Then comes the dry- and wetsanding with 100 grit paper. I don’t have pics of that but there’s not much to be seen. I did take a few pics later on when I was wetsanding the plexi for the window. They will be in one of the following posts.

For polishing I use the Novus Heavy & Novus Fine Scratch Remover. It’s great stuff, works really well on the AC Ryan acrylic. I tried it on a generic transparant acrylic plate as well, and that also gave a nice result. I can only recommend this stuff. Here you see the fine scratch remover behind the finished plexi. A good polishing cloth is indispensable for a good result!


The finished plexi. Difficult to capture with a camera. It’s nice and shiny, like I said before it lacks blue glowing because of the tape (and less than ideal lighting conditions at the time).


And another one, I find this a much better pic than the previous one
You can clearly see the inner ring through it, as well as the far edges and corners.


I then drilled the holes to mount the whole thing. Here’s a pic of the result:


The plexi will give more glow after the tape is removed, since the light will reflect on the aluminium underneath it. That’s not a scratch or dent you see on the side of the plexi, I don’t know what it is actually. Probably a reflection.

Another pic of the almost finished project. As for the positioning of the black alu cover: I said this in my first post in this thread (but who remembers that? Or read that?): I’m going to add a label there at the end.
Oh, and did I mention already how much I love the dualcolor look of that fillport? Heh.


Last but not least, remember how ugly the cut for the fillport was in the case panel? Well, it turns out that the plexi ‘nut’ that it comes with, completely covers that uglyness. Jippie! In this pic, you can still see through it. A few minutes and some sanding later, not anymore….


That’s all for this project. I hope you liked it. I liked taking pics of this, it’s only a small section and I had very decent lighting most of the time. I hope you liked the pics as much as I do (and what about that fillport, lol)…

This concludes the work on the top panel of the case. There’s still work to do on several other panels: front, leftside, bottom and lower backside. The most interesting work will be on the front and leftside. These were also the biggest and – on the front – the most difficult projects of the whole mod. So prepare for the stuff that puts hair on your chest!
Just kidding, but nevertheless…keep the valium in reach

Until next time, where I will either post some pics about the PSOne LCD or the window. Most likely the LCD…

 

the fillport looks awesome

 

Time for an update!

PSOne LCD – VGA mod

Since I’ve got a nice big front panel, I needed some stuff to put into it. And of course an LCD screen is one of the first things that comes to mind in that situation. I opted for the Sony PSOne LCD. A sketch showing how it’s perfect to fill the remaining space on the inside of the case:


I’ve got quite a story to tell about this. But I’ll try to keep it short!
You see, originally I bought this screen to connect it on an s-video port. But my computer is already connected to my TV through the s-video port of my video card. Anyway, at the time I bought the LCD I didn’t care much. I also bought the sony car adapter for it, to connect it to the 12V of the PSU.

But upon reading more and more about the screen on Bit-tech and other forums, I started leaning more and more towards the VGA-mod of the LCD. Problem: I’m an nvidia man. The video card that will go in this case is an Asus Geforce 6800GT (the latest version with 256MB DDR3). It rocks, but can’t handle the LCD in its native resolution (640x480i) because it has no composite sync. Solution: use secondary PCI video card like matrox mystique. Bought one of those on ebay. So far so good.

Now, in order to grasp the whole thing, you’ve gotta know that I’ve hardly done any soldering in my life. I’ve done some at school and I was pretty good at it, but that’s already a long time ago. Nevertheless here I was preparing for this mod. It scared the hell out of me. I was going to solder stuff for the first time in 15 years and it would immediately be something as small as a 15-pin plug.

Anyway, I bought a VGA-plug and everything. I read in a few places that this mod works well with a network cable, since you only need 7 pins and the network cable has 8 (I’m using a PAL version of the LCD and then you actually need 8 pins, one for a DCC signal. But there’s another way to go with that signal and I took that option). So I chopped off the end of the cable and started stripping wires and soldering them to the VGA-plug. And it went okay! No real problems, it took me a while since it was so long since I had done any soldering. In the heat of the moment, I forgot to take pics though, so you’ll have to do with just one pic of the finished cable:


Not a lot to see there, I know.

Then came the other part: the LCD screen side. I used this guide:
http://rudyatek.com/tidder/lcd/
It has clear pics and explains everything nicely.

First, strip the other end of the network cable and 7 of its wires:


Prepare the LCD screen cable, as you can see you need to strip 5 wires that are next to eachother and 1 more for the DCC signal.


And a while later, here’s the result. The four wires that are covered with yellow heatsink are the ‘live’ ones: the R,G, and B signals and the C-sync. The red heatshrink close to the yellow ones covers the ground wires for the RGB (they are all soldered to the same wire of the LCD screen connector) and the other red heatshrink covers the wire for the DCC signal.


The DCC signal is just a 5V signal, it is taken directly from the LCD screen’s pcb. You need this signal only if you use a PAL version of the screen (to start it up).


Another one. The connector that’s plugged in is the one I soldered the VGA-cable to.


After that, it was testing time. So I connected the whole thing to a spare PSU and fired it up. No flashes or flames and the backlight of the screen worked. I then connected it to the VGA port of my ‘spare’ computer. You can’t see it in this pic since I had to take in with the flash turned on, but it is displaying the BIOS and POST screen. Only it’s scrolling very rapidly because the LCD is on the wrong timings.


Then I tried to get it to work with the hardware that’s going in this case. And that’s when the problems started. First I tried it with my normal vid card. That didn’t work but didn’t surprise me cause it’s an nvidia card.
Next was to install the Matrox mystique. The computer accepted the card without a problem. But I could not get it to work properly. I spent hours trying all kinds of stuff. It had to be some kind of driver problem, I don’t know. Powerstrip also didn’t want to allow advancing timing options on it. So I finally thought it could be the vid card that was somehow faulty.
I then tried a Matrox millenium G200. Same stuff all around.
Finally I gave in and I just connected it to the s-video port of my GF6800. This should work with any vid card and it did. The image quality is not as good as with a VGA-signal (at least, according to what I’ve read), but it’s not bad at all!


The LCD screen can’t be permanently connected to the s-vid port of my GF6800 though, since my TV is on it. So I bought a GF Mx4000 PCI card. This card works perfectly together with my GF6800 (it better!). It has a VGA and s-video port. But the computer won’t accept a second s-video signal if there’s no VGA monitor connected to the second video card…I’ve got a solution planned for that though!

To stop with this rambling, a bit of advice. If you want to use this LCD screen without all this kind of nonsense, go for a primary vid card that supports composite sync. That should be easier (but do some reading/checking first!!!!)

 

PSOne LCD – mounting

After all the problems I encountered in getting the LCD to work, I thought making the mounting holes for it would be a breeze. I was wrong.

*the horror tale of the PSOne LCD continues*

First the easy part. I marked the hole that I needed to cut for it, I also did the hole for my button/swithes/aquaero panel in the same process.


These two holes required perfect edges, so I gave it my best.


The front of the LCD screen. There’s a small edge that remains black even when powered up, but that will leave a nice edging between the image on the screen and my case panel.


The opening I cut was perfect. Here’s the screen taped to it.


And another one. The metal frame of the screen matches my cuts.


Because the screen was in the exact right position I kept it taped on and proceeded to drill the mounting holes. The metal frame and pcb of the screen are connected to its housing with screws. I used the holes of these as a guide for my mounting holes. They are only wide enough for M2,5 bolts.


I installed the bolts. There had to be a spacer because the mounts of the metal frame of the screen are recessed. So I put a nut over each bolt.


Then I put the LCD over the bolts. I had to put some tension on this, the bolts were not exactly right. Or at least, I tought that was all. When I flipped over the panel to see the result, the screen was completely off target. It was more than 2mm too low and a bit rotated. In short: mouting holes…bad! I don’t know what happened, the screen must have moved while I was marking the holes.

I then checked my mounting holes, but their alignment was actually pretty much okay. Since I didn’t want to start drilling them to a bigger size (it would have had to be a much bigger size, the screen was really waaaay off), I decided the best thing to do was to adjust the metal frame of the screen. That only comes off easy if you take the whole thing apart. Ever wanted to see what a disassembled PSOne LCD looks like? Here it is:


This was followed by a grueling hour of filing, drilling, fitting, filing etc etc of that metal frame, until finally it sat straight. But I couldn’t get it exactly right, it was now say 1,2mm too low compared to the original opening I cut. I couldn’t go too far on the frame since the pcb can only move a limited bit away from it. So I had only one choice: enlarge the opening I cut in the front panel. As a result, the metal frame of the screen is now a lot more visible. I don’t like it, but that was the only thing I could think off at the time. Maybe it’s not that bad when everything is installed in the case and it’s on my desk. But at the time, it was very disappointing and I was very angry at myself for not rechecking the markings I made more thoroughly.

Anyway: here’s the screen properly installed. I think I’m going to make a protective plate for it, I’ve got some mesh.


And the front of the panel. The bolts will be replaced by socket heads, but I didn’t have them at the time. At least, not of the right length.


The frame is now very visible. It’s worse in real life than it looks in this pic.



WOW these two posts were extremely long. Sorry to have rambled on so hard, but this was supposed to be an easy project in the beginning (s-video), then grew into something more challenging (VGA and secondary vid card), and finally turning into a tale of horror. You can imagine my frustrations with it. This was nothing like I expected it to be.

I guess I wrote all of this because I needed some closure
Because it IS a nice screen, it is pretty cheap, and it works perfectly on s-video or composite signal, with no soldering or anything required. I should have just gone that way. I knew in advance I would have problems getting it to work with the VGA-mod because of my nvidia vid card. The VGA-mod itself is pretty easy, but make sure you’re prepared for the stuff that follows it…the end.

 

wow nice

dont u think u should put a plexi cover over it or somthing, to protect the screen ?

 

well I thought about it, but I won't put anything in front of it. It's not that the case will be moved that much.
I'm still thinking about he backside, I could make a cover out of mesh for that.

 

yeh but i think you might be moving ^^

yoiu might impact it or somthing, but anyway its up to you

 

nice all custom case

but what are you using the stacker for? just wondering. I'm doing a mod using two stackers. I thought about an all original case but like you with the mobo tray didn't want to waste time making mobo tray, drive cage, etc.

 

I'm not using the Stacker at all, I had one 'lying around' at the time and I just used it for size comparison

 

Window – part one

Now this was a fun and extremely rewarding project!!
I’ve almost catched up to where I am with the case in real life by the way. Yup, posting this goes a lot faster than doing the actual work!

As usual, let’s begin with a sketch:


The sketch is clear about the size and shape of the window. It’s going to be pretty big…and is inspired on the rammstein-logo. The sketch is not really accurate on the colors. It should be clear that I’m going for a smoked plexi window with 4 pieces of UV blue plexi behind that. The idea is that when the pc is turned off or when the lights aren’t on, that the window is dark or you can see only a bit through it. When the UV lights are on, it should become a see-through with a nice glow around it from the blue plexi. And, well I’m glad to say that in reality, it comes close to this idea.

But first came the cutting and filing process of course. I encountered no problems. From this:


To this:


Then I started on the 4 UV blue plexi pieces. I took a full panel and drew one piece in each corner:


The window’s size allows me to keep a full smoked plexi panel without cutting anything off. So I could also check that the 4 pieces I marked on the blue panel were okay, since both panels are equally sized. This gives a good idea of what the final thing will be like:


Next thing was obviously sawing those 4 pieces, with the jigsaw. My original plan was not to keep the corner pieces but to I did keep them because I thought that they will catch more UV light this way. Here are the 4 pieces right after they were sawed and after a quick pass with the file:


A couple of hours later, the filing was done. This took quite a while:


I paid extra attention to keep them all the same size. No sanding was done on them when I took this pic so they didn’t glow (yet):


A quick laydown to see that they’re okay.


Then came the sanding and polishing part. These were more or less the first parts of this case that I removed the covering tape from. Here’s a pic when they were sanded with 600 grit, only dry- and wetsanding with 1000 grit remaining:


They’re alive! Another one…


During wetsanding, the light blue glow becomes more intense. Hmm wetsanding in the kitchen sink, better than doing the dishes if you ask me:


The first piece all polished. I carved a number in each of the pieces for easy reference. You can see that I also drilled the mounting holes for them. I forgot to mention this earlier.


And a while later, all 4 pieces were done. Nice.


This finishes the preparation phase. Coming right up: bling bling shots !

 

Window – part two

Continuing on the window. So, it was time to test it in the case and with lighting. Now, I never used smoked plexi before and I didn’t know how it was going to behave. So I didn’t drill mounting holes in it right away, I just taped it to the alu panel for this test. If the result was going to be too dark, I could just keep it for some other use and it would still be undrilled. In that case, I would have to go with normal transparant plexi instead of the smoked plexi. But it wasn’t the case, as you’ll soon see.

So, here is the panel with smoked and uv blue plexi all taped up. This looks great, right? I’m almost sad I have to put this the other way around in the case!


And another, the uv blue plexi now has a nice glow.


When turned around and in normal daylight, with light accessing the panel from the back, the blue is almost invisible. This is what I was aiming for, so far so good!


Looking closer, there is only a little bit of the blue visible:


Then on to the real testing. The evening was kicking in so it was a perfect moment to see how the window behaves without any lighting in the case. I also covered up all the holes I already cut in the other case panels, as they will of course be closed when the case is finished. As you can see, there’s not much to be seen! Still so far so good…


Next test: PSU turned on. This is the PSU you saw in one of my previous posts. You can see a nice deep toned down blue. The smoked panel acts as a very nice filter.
Besides that PSU, I’ve got a blue led 120mm fan that will always be on when the pc is on. If that one makes it too bright, I’ll cut off the leds. Then there’s the Aqua-Computer logo on the GF6800 waterblock. That’s only small though and not too bright.


The next thing was the same test but now with a light in the room turned on. This is more realistic than the previous pic, since I mostly have a light on during the evening/night in the room where the case will be. This pic shows the toned down and very smooth/sexy blue glow…still so far so good, this is going very well!


And now for the money shot. I taped a 30cm CCFL to each of the vertical side bars of the frame. I only have two at the moment, I wanted to see in this test whether I have to add two more (to the top and bottom bar of the frame). I switched them on, and….wooooow!

(I put the pic a bit lower so some of you would at least read the text above it)





The smoked panel becomes much more transparant (but not entirely, there’s still a bit of toning down on the blue). The edges of the blue plexi get a nice glow. This is almost what I wanted to achieve. I need your advice on this, see the end of this post. First I’ll let you enjoy the rest of the pics.

From another angle. Although the camera cannot catch the exact colour of the thing in real life, this pic comes really close:


By the way, the 4 blue plexi pieces are not properly aligned, that is of course because they’re just taped on, will be much better when the bolts are in.

And a last shot with a light in the room turned on.


So, the smoked plexi was definitely going in there! I drilled the mounting holes and put the whole thing together:


And the final result:


---

Okay, now what I wanted to ask you guys. If you look at the three pics where the UV light is turned on, the edges of the blue plexi glow nicely, but I was hoping that the whole pieces would glow and not just their edges. This is partly okay, in the places where they are close to the CCFL’s (left and right side). However, the CCFL’s are not competely against the side bars of the frame since the wires for connecting them to the inverter are too short (or my case is too big), so in the final state the glow will be somewhat dimmer.

So, how would I go about making the blue plexi pieces glow more, not just their edges but the whole piece? I know the best thing would be to drill holes in them and glue uv leds in, but I don’t want to do that since that side panel needs to come off easily and I don’t want to have to fiddle with connectors every time. Another solution would problably be to sand (frost) the plexi, but then it would not be transparant when the UV lights are off, so I would like to avoid that as well.

Would adding two more 30cm CCFL’s (to top and bottom of the case frame) help? Or maybe some leds (taped to the bars of the case frame so they can stay connected when the panel’s off)? I also got some UV laser leds lying around…???

All ideas on this welcome!!!! Thanks in advance for you help!!!

 

Good to see another custom built case on the forums and finally another log which has proper depth to the posts, my first log seemed to get . interesting to see a double skin case, have you considered putting sound deadening foam between the skins to further reduce the noise?

The frame structure is nicely done too, when i was designing mine i didnt consider using solid bars, probably to my cost as the design is ended up with is far more complex in retrospect.

Where did you get the Lian-Li PC60 mobo from as ive found no-where outside of the US who sell them, and they either ignore me or wont ship to the UK.

 

First of all thanks for the nice words.

I've considered the foam between skins, but I don't think it will be necessary.
All noise-generating equipment will be mounted with rubber washers and stuff like that so that will already take care of most of it. There's only the hard drives and the aquastream pump left and I guess that a bit of foam won't solve that...

I bought the Lian-Li tray at performance-pcs. (link) I ordered a bunch of other stuff from them too. Shipping cost was not too bad, and they were very friendly.

 

*cries over unused stacker*

that window is gorgeous!
as far as lighting, have you considered perhaps some kind of quick disconnect for leds in the acryilic that easily disconnects when you pull off the panel? Or perhaps fitting a contact patch type of connection so that it makes contact when the panel is screwed on; easy-on, easy-off with no wires to plug (hmmm. i dunno. could be a slight risk but it shouldn't be too much voltage right?)

 

well I actually got a lot of replies at Wizdforums, and I'm convinced now that I will first try sanding the UV blue pieces. Only light sanding at first and stop once it's got the effect I want. I'm hoping it will only need a very light sanding, this won't kill the transparancy too much. Oh well, we'll see.

anyway, thanks for the idea. It had crossed my mind as well, and it's good to see that it wasn't so over the top as I thought

 

Optical bay – part one

This is the last project I’m posting before I catch-up more or less to where I am right now. It was a big project and I’ll need three posts for it. This part shows the modding of the dvd-drives and attaching them to their supports. The next part is the work on the front panel of the case and making the black alu and plexi panels. Finally, a shorter third post will show the support I made for the Aquatube.

Here’s a sketch of what it should look like at the end:


But first things first. I made the side mounting plates for the optical bay a long time ago, a few pics of this were already posted a while ago. Apart from those, this project started with making three small pieces of alu (black) that will be used improve the looks of the trays of the dvd-drives and to cover the floppy.

The biggest piece is for the floppy. You may wonder how that will work? Well, it will be attached with bolts and I’ll unscrew them when I need the floppy. I only need it like 5-10 times a year you see.

Then I made openings in my dvd-drives because I’m relocating their pushbuttons and leds. I wanted to make the openings really tight so that the four wires that will pass through them are tighly clamped. That way I have only a very small chance the wires get loose inside the drives. They are soldered on but the solder points are small, so any help to keep the wires where they need to be is welcome!

Here’s the opening in my Pioneer dvd-burner:


And the one in my Samsung dvd-reader. This unit is already pretty old but it reads everything you feed it. And I really mean everything. Nasty scratches etc…? No problem for this drive. I can’t tell you how many CDs and DVDs I recovered the data from for my friends. When they are unreadable on every drive they try, they know who to turn to…me and my samsung reader!
Thus unit is beige (Pioneer is black) and I will paint it with vinyl dye. Eventually.


A couple of pics of the wire-soldering action. Instead of very long wires, I opted to solder on short wires with a 2-pin connector on them. You’ll see why later on when I get to the wiring. Much, much later on, in a couple of months or so!
This is the wiring to recolate the pushbutton switch of the Pioneer.


And with a test-setup with the final switch for it. It works! Of course that switch will be further away in the end, otherwise this would be a stupid mod right?


The Led of the Pioneer drive is far away. Here it is also soldered, and the wires are in their final position.


Same procedure for the Samsung drive. Here a pic with my test set-up. It also works. And needs some cleaning before painting….


Full frontal shot of the two drives. The alu plates are temperarily attached to them with double sided tape (the kind that is used to place carpets).


Here I’m starting on the holes in the support plates. This wasn’t easy since they need to be quite perfect.


But it went okay, much better than I anticipated actually. Here’s a shot of the ‘finished’ cage:


And another one. The black bay for installing the floppy is made of plastic. You won’t see much of it anyway during normal operation.


I install this in the case by mounting it to the top of the frame. M4 bolts, a toothlock washer and a rubber spacer are used for this. This isn’t very easy (because the washer and spacer keep falling from the bolts when I move the thing into position) and I should have tried to design this in another way. On the other hand, how often will this cage need to be dissambled? Maybe once a year or so. So it’s no big deal.


And here’s a test with the front panel of the case on. I made the openings for the dvd-trays in this panel. Here I’m testing that they’re in the right position and of the right size. They needed some adjusting, in this pic that’s already done.


The final pic of this post shows the end result of making the openings in the front panel. Their right side is a bit off, but only a little (pic exaggerates it actually). They will hardly be visible anyway.

 

Optical bay – part two

The work on the cage and the front panel of the case was done. Time to move on to the black alu coverpanel.

I started with the three openings for the dvd-trays and floppy cover. Then I did the outside edges of the panel. Here these are done. I did a quick test clamping it to the front panel and opening and closing the dvd-trays. All went well.


On the right side of this panel, the coverplate of the Aquatube will be installed. This is the same thing as I did for the radiator coverplate: the Aqua-Computer plate is exactly 2mm thick, just the same as my black alu piece. So I cut out an opening for it, to let it ‘sink’ into the panel. The hard part were the rounded corners. But they went okay on the radiator plate so I was confident it would go okay this time as well. They will be more visible on this plate, so I took my time, went ahead very slow with only minor adjustments in between measuring and trying to fit the coverplate. The result is quite astonishing:


And with the coverplate in:


And another, with the floppy cover in as well:


There’s actually a tiny bit of space between the black alu and both the Aquatube and the floppy covers. I’m going to make a UV-blue plexi plate as well, and when that is lighted it should give a sweet effect (at least, I hope so).

Clamping the black alu piece to the frontplate for drilling the mounting holes. That also went okay, I tapped the mounting holes for the black alu so I don’t need nuts to fasten it. For the Aquatube I am using nuts because of its weight.


Speaking of the Aquatube, here’s the hole I made for it in the front panel of the case. It will sit directly against its coverplate, none of the UV blue plexi will be between them.


After this, I proceeded to make the UV blue plexi plate. This was done in the normal way, I’m not posting pics of this. All went well here as well. I’ve definitely improved my skills a lot since I started with this case.

Here are some pics of the end result. The plexi is sandwiched between the case panel and the black alu, same as I did for the fillport and radiator. A few bolts are partially in to put everything in the right place.






And here’s the result with the Aquatube mounted. I just love this.


A close-up of the Aquatube for your viewing pleasure!


It may look so, but this project is not done yet! I need to make some mesh pieces and a support for the Aquatube. The latter is for the next post.

I bought some of the AC Ryan MeshX. It looks very nice, its holes are small and that was what I wanted.
Strange: AC Ryan doesn’t put a protective layer on their plexi, but they do on the Mesh. It’s not sharp or anything. Funny.


Here’s a piece cut out and filed off. The black alu is of course the backside that won’t be seen.


I wanted to check the result of the mesh on the black alu. The holes in the mesh are actually smaller than I thought they would be. So instead of a black plate with some mesh on it, you get a perforated normal alu plate with some black behind it. I still like it though. What do you guys think?


I also need to do some stuff like paint the Samsung drive, make the wiring for the relocated buttons and leds, make the wiring for powering the drives. This is for later, though I promise it will be sweet. I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve for that!

 

Optical bay – part three

This final part of the optical bay project shows some pics off the support I made for the Aquatube. This wasn’t necessary since my case panel is thick enough not to bend. It just seemed not right when the Aquatube was just ‘hanging’ there without a support. I already had this feeling when I was making my sketches.

Here’s a sketch of the support. Well, technically it’s not a support because it’s above the Aquatube and not underneath it. But anyway, you get the point.


First thing, as always was marking, cutting, filing, drilling mounting holes. I intentionally made the end that goes to the Aquatube (the vertical one in this pic) too long so I would have enough of it to make it perfect. Lucky me – read on and you’ll see.


Then came the bending. Now, there was only one bend needed, and I managed to screw it up. LOL.
I bended it the wrong way, since the support is not symmetric I couldn’t just flip it over.


The bend was okay, but it was wrong, the taped parts should have been on the other side.


So I was thinking about it, not liking the idea of having to start over on this support. And then I realized that because I made the end that goes to the Aquatube too long, I could probably still reach it with a ‘minor’ adjustment. A few good punches from the hammer later, I was left with this:


I don’t know about you, but I actually liked this better than my original design! Cool! The end that is bent upwards a bit was going to be filed off, so it was pretty perfect. Woohoo!

Like I said, perfect…


And another one. The support is mounted with rubber spacers, both on the case frame and on the Aquatube. Obviously, I need a shorter bolt for the Aquatube mount. I really like the look of it though.


The last thing to do was filing off the excess bit of alu on the Aquatube end. Here’s the final result:


And here we are. It took me a while, but I’ve more or less caught up to where I am with this case irl. So from now on, I’ll probably make smaller updates. Maybe more frequent. Hope you’ll all keep following the mod!!

See you soon with the first pics of the work on the ‘bottom panel’, which is the panel that contains the aquaero, buttons, switches, usb-hub. On the inside of the case, it covers the pump and will be extensively used for wiring and stuff. You hear it, I’ve got big plans…

 

Is there a brand name for that psu?