Case Mod - In Progress Project: Lobo - Updated 19th October 2009

I originally started this modding log over on modders-inc but have decided to also post it here as, since custompc took over bit-tech, I figured I might get a little more local (ie UK) response here - I'm not one to post all over the net so chances are this log, and the one on modders-inc will be the only two - besides - it's easier to keep logs up to date if you don't have to trawl around two dozen sites to do so lol....

The Lobo Wolves “Canis Lupus Nubilus” – derived their name from a word in the Blackfoot Indian language meaning “Buffalo Wolf”, which, when spoken aloud, sounded like the word “lobo”. They were also known as the Buffalo gray, or Loafer wolf, and followed the migration of the buffalo herds throughout the Rocky Mountains, from northern Canada to New Mexico. A large lobo wolf could weigh as much as 100 pounds and had a life span of about 20 years. They were described as the consummation of absolute savagery, and had seldom been tamed.

Source : Bradford Landmark Society​

I have always much admired Lupine, by Tech-daddy (which I watched step by step as it was built on another forum) and have long considered "cloning" it so I'd have one and after much thought I decided to go ahead and do it. I'm not a thief or a plagiarist, so my first stop was TD himself, asking his permission to copy his creation, albeit with a twist. TD was kind enough not only to agree to it, but to wish me the best.

NOTE TO ALL: Before anyone starts calling me copycat, I am doing this with Tech-daddys 100% knowledge and approval (well he approves now - might change his mind if I make a mess of it LOL)

I spent several days after that trying to come up with a name for the project - calling it Lupine, or LupineII just felt wrong - and as I had so many plans to make something different to, but partially inspired by Lupine, a tribute to felt like it would be selling the project short.

So I went hunting on google for something, anything original and appropriate and after a few days of that, I gave up and asked the wife.... She turned and said "Lobo" instantly. When I asked her why, she explained about the Lobo wolves of Kane - where she lived until I imported her to the UK about 3 years ago - and so the name stuck - it has direct relevance to the Wolf itself, adds the personal touch as it relates to the wife's hometown, and also there's a little nod in there to TD too, as Lupine was a project originally started for his wife.

Enough story - pics.....

This is the old PC I'm going to reinvent in this project. A Chieftec Dragon - remember those - they really were among, if not THE first of the true "enthusiast" cases...



I actually started another project based on this but I've now shelved that permanently - and it was several years ago too so this has been sitting in a partially done state since way back then - it's time to get 'er done

The following are OLD pics of the original work done back in May 2006, some, if not all of which will be re-done or refinished, but I didn't want it to look like I'd gone from the case and made huge jumps without explanation so....

The following may be slightly out of chronological order but.... I'm sure you'll figure it out heh
Quick disassembly...



Pull and strip the fan controller...



Kill the badge hole on the door...






Priming up the loose bits...


Carefully masking the holes - I've had stuff NOT go back in after paint because of the thickness of the paint and don't want to do THAT again...


Bit of colour of the loose parts...


Quick scotchbrite and layer of colour on the front (already painted silver so no real need to re-prime it)



And finally, a quick coat of primer on the inside of the side panel which was not orginally being cut...


All of these images are of work I did almost 3 1/2 years ago when I was starting a different project with this case - I've done a good bit more and will post more information very shortly (possibly immediately) but don't want to flood the lot on and break the number of images per post limit.... More very soon...

 

I've always been one for paying too much attention to the minor things - it's probably why a lot of what I start doesn't get finished unfortunately. This project, and another one I have in the works, K-9-PC are the start of the new me - I WILL finish them, and in a timely fashion - but I'm still going to pay attention to details.

So.... the opening panel has a plain black textured plastic lockable quick-release handle. I want it smooth and colour co-ordinated.



Pull out the 80mm fan and grille and consign them to one of the parts baskets in my work-room..



And out with the handle...



4 screws, one nut, and a little more force than I was truly comfortable with later...



Quick sand with some 120 grit wet n dry (used dry)...



A coat of el-cheapo aerosol primer...



And another...



And a final sand down...



Now nice and smooth - they'll get another good sanding before being primed up properly with a high quality 2pack primer - for this project I'll be using Lechlers Green Ti Filler Primer. I only used the cheap aersol primer above to show me the high and low spots on the handle so I could get it really smooth. There are times when you're modding you need to save a little money with cheaper materials or tools - paint, in my opinion, is NOT a good one to choose....

More coming soon....

 

First things first, made up a design for the bottom edge of the window...



Then I drew a rectangle around the whole panel, using, of all things, a carpet strip (brass thing you put under a doorway to hide the join between carpets in two different rooms) to keep the distance from the edge equal on all four sides. Then I got a little inventive. I used a dremel cutting disk to draw the curve around the handle - worked wonderfully - if anyone here ever needs to follow a curved line, this is the way to go - I just put the tip of the pencil into the hole in the disk, pushed the edge of the disk up to the handle and started to draw, putting slight pressure towards the handle and the pencil/wheel just followed the line giving me a perfect curve which will be exactly the same distance from the handle all the way around it. Then I cut out the template and traced the edges.



Then I went over it in black marker pen - pencil marks disappear far too easily in cutting disk/steel dust lol. There were some smudges but the lines were more than clear enough and the smudges were all on the part that was getting cut away so no problems there...



Then I started to cut - first I did a rough cut around the wolf himself - last thing i wanted was pressure on that part of the window as I cut further and further around the outline...



Then started on the long straights...



Until finally the first rough cut was finished and the centre piece fell free...



That's when I noticed the first of the rust I mentioned in the last post...



But not a problem - stuck a wire wheel into the dremel and it took it all off in seconds...

I can only apologise for some of the pics - I work a few shifts a week as a security guard and I took the side panel into work with me to work on between patrols - I have to do like, 10 mins work every hour - the other 50 mins are mine to do with as I please. This panel was being cut between about 7.30pm and 2am a couple of nights ago - as it got darker the quality of the pics fell - the halogen worklight either confused the camera so the flash didnt go off, or it didn't and the flash reflected off of the metallic silver paint currently on the panel. You can still see how I went, but expect better pics as the log progresses

 

I love your side panel, it is near identical to an idea that has been bouncing about my head for some time now, although yours looks better
+rep and subbed

 

I can't take credit for the panel - tech-daddy was the guy who did Project: Lupine a few years back and the wolf side window is 100% his idea. I have spoken with him and have his ok to copy it, but yeah, I did the work but the idea is/was totally his....

Lupine, by tech-daddy

 

Last week - went shopping - looking for some kind of mesh without paying fortunes for "proper" mesh - was thinking waste paper bins, maybe pizza trays - things like that. After 4 stops with no joy, I ended up in IKEA where I bought....

A coffee table - box damaged and parts possibly missing (like I cared lol) for the grand sum of £2.50 (about $4)...



And some handles (for K-9-PC - I'm currently only listing this project on a different forum but I'll shift it here when the sheet metal company gets their fingers out of their asses and gets me a damned price - can't do a thing till then anyway)



And while I'm on the subject of buying stuff - before work last weekend I stopped for this...



and when I got home that night, these had arrived...


50x 3mm 3.5v 10,000mcd white LED's - decided I don't want lots of colour in this case...
Credit to LED Depot in the UK - I only paid for these yesterday (I think) thursday at the earliest - nice quick despatch and good bulk prices - I never buy just what I need when it comes to LED's - I have trays of them in a whole range of colours/sizes now.

I mentioned earlier that I want to replace the 80mm fans in the front of this with 120's - easier said than done, I assure you! It SHOULD fit, in theory...




but not without some big changes so last night, I went into the garden and made a start on cutting that ugleeee vent out of the front of the plastic front panel and MAN what a nightmare - it was so thick, and the way it was constructed, it was taking about 6 different cuts with a dremel cut-off wheel to get EACH ONE out - took the best part of an hour just to get it from this...



to this....



and then at work today, I pushed on and got it tidied up a lot - ended up using a utility knife to carve out the debris as both the cutting wheel and sanding cylinder on the dremel clone just melted stuff and made more mess, and I couldn't get in with a file coarse enough to get the job done in less than a week!

I also started cutting out the door centre...




I decided not to cut the whole door centre out so it'd retain most of it's strength.

and again tidied it up at work today. A little additional sanding and shaping and I ended up with this...



This really is the worst kind of modding, because I really don't know 100% what I'm doing with this front panel - I just went at it with a couple of vague ideas. NOW I think I've decided to put mesh in both holes, with the two 120mm fans behind the bottom half and a piece of frosted perspex, illuminated with some of these white LED's in the top. This is assuming I can get the 120's in, there are structural issues with the case I have to take into account....



See the two little bits sticking into the case, attached to the front panel under the 5.25" bays? Those are the mounts for the 3.5" bays and they CANNOT BE MOVED - the bays lock in both top and bottom so the position appears to be set. This means I can't just cut a hole in the front to make the 120mm fans fit - I'm basically hoping like hell there's enough clearance between that metal front and the back of the plastic for them to go there - if there is, I'll cut away as much metal as possible to improve airflow without taking out the drive bay mounts.

The mesh coffee table - had a bit of a slice-up of that just to see how it'd be to cut, and what the mesh would be like once free from the frame...



I thought it was really easy to cut but there was actually more resistance than I realised - it cut really quickly but I soon noticed the cutting wheel shrinking really quickly - a sign you're going to fast. So I did it again, and again, knowing I'd need some small disks for the detail work around the wolf, speaking of which....



You can't really tell from the pic, but those lines are straight as an arrow and the corners are nice and smooth - I filed all of the edges and then sanded them with dry 180grit wet n dry to get a really smooth tidy finish on them - I swear you couldn't cut yourself anywhere in that window if you tried!

When it came to carving out the details, especially around the wolf, I decided to try something a little different - one of the mandrels I have for cut-off wheels has an unusually long screw, so I put 3 disks in at once and used that to grind away little bits at a time - the additional width gave me a smoother cut and the disks reinforced each other so I didn't get a single shatter - a BIG improvement on the other night when I was smashing disks left, right and centre.

Then I started scrubbing off paint. First thing I had to do is pull out about 20 of these little things...



They're little anti-vibration spring-clips I think - they only go on the side with the wolf window which also happens to be the side with the handle - I'm guessing they cut down on vibrations IF you only use the catch and no screws to hold the panel in place.

Then I started with the wire-wheel on the base...



Which came out pretty nice, and relatively quick too - about 10 mins start to finish...



Same with the top - a little quicker if anything...



Then the un-cut side panel - which was a whole other story. I'd primed this panel up about 3 1/2 YEARS ago when I was kinda sorta half-heartedly doing a project with this case and the primer, over time had become pretty much bulletproof. After spending about twice as long as I'd spent on BOTH the top and bottom together, I'd only gotten this far...



And to be honest I was worried about burning out the drill. Generally speaking, drills are designed for short bursts of activity - how long does it take to drill the average hole? This drill had been on, pretty much constantly for the best part of an hour and a half so I gave in and called someone to pick this up for me...



After a couple of hours soaking into the primer (after the 20 mins the tin said, nothing had changed - the primer was that hard) I tried again and the rest came off much more easily, so I went ahead and VERY carefully did the wolf panel - last thing I wanted to do after the approx 15 hours I'd spent on it, was wreck it with the wire wheel.

End result...



And all the nice paint-free panels lined up in a row...



After all that work the wire wheel was looking pretty shot...



And the clamping bench I'm using as a work bench had a couple of war-wounds too...



Finally - as it was getting seriously dark and I was about due to finish work for the day, I took on what may well have turned out to be the biggest challenge of the day - getting all my crap BACK into the car!!!



That's the biggest problem with me doing my modding at work - I never REALLY know which tools/parts/accessories I'm going to need so I have to take a LOT of gear just in case - I'd hate to be in just the right mood to push on and get a load of work done and then find myself stuck for want of "just that one thing".

Anyway - thanks for reading - final gratuitous shot of the wolf I'm probably WAY too proud of...



For the record, I was worried that, once I cut out the gaps between his legs this part of the panel would be WAY too flimsy for comfort - as it happens, it's still really strong - says something about the quality and thickness of the steel these old tanks were made from... No wonder I've used probably 30-40 disks on this window alone!!!

 

You certainly have a right to be proud of that wolf... Excellent work. Keep it going.

 

that is one awesome looking wolf cut. Any sketches or plans for the build? Can't wait to see more.

 

Not really - plans are all kinda mental images in my head - the main thing I want to do next is get a LOT more cooling into this case. My current PC is a Q6700/8GB/4870 setup and assuming this case comes out the way I want it to, I'm hoping to transplant that into it from the Antec 900 it's in now. This case comes from the time when the 80mm fan was king and has mounts all over the place for 80's - I'm working at the moment on getting a pair of 120's in the front, almost certainly one or possibly two (probably one) in the roof and one in the rear. Thats going to be a challenge as there isn't anywhere near enough space (yet) to get a 120 in the back....

I'm definitely going with a tinted perspex in the main window - and probably in another couple of opaque windows elsewhere in the case - and assuming I can find someone to do it, I want to get a moon laser-etched into the back of the main window so that wolf has something to howl at - that'll be lit up with a white directional LED or two. Going to order the perspex soon so I can try frosting an off-cut - not sure how a tinted sheet will take to the usual sanding technique - worried it might just go white with the scratches :s

Also got my eye on some nice looking 120mm fans - smoke grey outer, clear blades, white LEDs - I don't plan to put any colour at all in this case - all shades and tones. Still trying to decide on a final colour for the case though - leaning towards a dark dark grey with lots of metallic in it, but on the other hand, the Lobo wolves are very light in colour so that's still a little up in the air. Definitely NOT going to be a bling bling in your face mod....

Thinking about getting the wolf airbrushed too so it'll stand out even more as a real feature but that'll be a budget, rather than a design decision I think - money is a lil tight at the moment (for pretty much all of us I'm betting)

Final thought is for a custom cut wolf fan grille for the top - either hand done with the dremel (now I'm sure I'm probably capable of the level of detail required) or possibly cut for me - a customer of mine saw the log today and said "Wish you'd told me about this earlier, I know a guy who could have cut that for you with a plasma cutter (meaning the wolf).

 

I've got two of these in the corner of my room, one modded which is begging for a re-mod, and the other is a virgin!

 

Nizzle window on the panel.. looks really awesome with that wolf since it's so simple.. looking forward to the etched moon on the tinted perspex..

 

I actually have a full tower version sitting here too - complete with a spare pre-windowed side panel - no clue what will happen to that - nothing soon - that's for sure lol

 

Nice design of the side panel. I keep an eye on this

 

The Wolf is really nice

Subbed

 

So I spent another 12 hour shift at work on this - spent the majority of it cutting, bending, folding, and then throwing away piece after piece of mesh - total achievements for the day was cutting, sanding and badly frosting a single piece of perspex so no pics or progress to report.

On another note - my plan to put a pair of 120mm fans in the front is also fubar - I've shaved as much plastic as I can off of the front panel cover and there's still at least a 2mm excess so they just will not fit, full stop. I'm going to try removing the bottom drive bay support, which will drop me down to a single internal 3.5" bay then find a way to mount a Thermaltake iCage in the front.



That'll give me back my 3 3.5" bays, and give me one of the two 120mm fans I wanted in the front. The whole case stands on feet with almost an inch of clearance from the floor, so I think I'm going to try putting the second 120mm in the base.

The front panel now has a HUGE hole in it for a single 120mm fan lol - so I'm also going to have to look into ways of filling that. I think the mesh idea is now dead in the water so I'm thinking about a perspex panel instead. I've already pretty much decided that's what I'm going to do in the door, if I can get it to curve nicely - so having something similar in the bottom (with a hole for the fan(s), obviously) should keep the consistency going and tidy it up nicely.

I've got my eye on this dark tinted perspex for the windows - the company will cut to size for me, and I'll then just fine-tune it - they've assured me the tint is all the way through, not just some kind of surface treatment so when they do the cuts, I'll ask them to send the off-cuts too so I can try frosting it to see how it'll look with a few of those white LED's fitted.

Having already asked on modders-inc I'm going to look into using a Mosfet to allow me to have 3 or 4 HD activity LEDS to make the effect of the illuminated frosted tinted perspex changing lighting colour more effective - wondering if Maplin will have anything like that in stock as the guy who hooked me up with a wiring diagram gave me some US sources for the mosfet.

Oh and I think I'm leaning towards a darker paint colour - something like a highly metallic dark dark grey.... I'm fortunate in that I have access to a paint mixing scheme, and I have a compressor/paint gun setup at home so I can make it exactly what I want instead of being stuck looking at aersols and hoping to find something close enough...

I think I might take a drive down to the paintshop today and have a flick through some colour chips. I really fancied a light tan colour to closer represent the colour of the Lobo wolves but, as my wife points out, that might end up just looking like a plain beige box - I'd hate to spend hours and hours getting the paint perfect, and have it end up looking like I didn't bother at all

 

Ok, so I might be about to bite off massively more than I can chew here - but I'm seriously thinking about trying to make this as a fan grille for a 120mm top exhaust.... I'd probably back it with mesh for stability and safety....



Opinions?

 

that is way cool, what about your friend from work who knows a guy? Could he help you out with that possibly?

 

I think the detail will be too fine for a plasma cutter - but I could be wrong - money just got super tight so I think I'll have a go myself this weekend first. I figure it'll use a few dozen cutting disks (non reinforced) but I have so many of those I'm not too worried about that - plus there's always the "I did this" thing - something to take pride in, instead of "I paid someone to do this" - know what I mean?

 

Argh - slight design problem - in that image, the ring needs to be thicker to allow it to 1) perfectly follow the circle of the fan blades on the inner diameter, and 2 be wide enough to allow for fan screws without having to have tabs. The problem I've just spotted (which should probably have been more obvious, is that roughly half of the wolves will be illuminated with the fan, while the other half will sit on the case and be whatever colour I end up painting the thing - not the look I was hoping for. If I make it small enough so the whole of the wolves are over the fan, i cut off about 60% of the airflow - if I move the wolves out so they're on the outside of the ring - the grille will be too wide for the case.... If i get some really thin perspex and make the wolves solid with frosted perspex, again I kill a lot of the airflow....

As it stands, I think it'll look something like this - please excuse the down n dirty 3 minute photobodge....



I got me some thinkin to do....

 

I'm thinking lower airflow on this fan WON'T be a bad thing. The case is going to have 2x120mm intakes on the front, a 120mm exhaust in the rear and a 120mm exhaust in the top. The PSU also acts as an exhaust so I'll still have more than enough exhaust with the top fan blocked about 30%.

The idea (for now lol) is to get a sheet of clear perspex and shape it so it follows the outside line perfectly, possibly with an angled bevel, and follows the inside just to the edges of the wolves. If I frost it, it should light up relatively evenly just with light from the fan - it'll raise the fan grille itself the thickness of the perspex which will give it a nice 3-d effect. If I use thick enough perspex - say 5-6mm, I could even light it with dedicated LEDs if the fan LEDs dont give off enough light to make it glow properly.... Or I could use the dark tinted perspex I'm already planning on buying to stay with the theme and give the light a greyish effect - stop it being too in-your-face....

Erm... another fairly quick n dirty image editing session and this might give you SOME idea what I mean - if you can imagine the grey as metallic lol - and the solid white as the glow you get from illuminated frosted perspex....



I'm still not sure about the dark grey - something in me is pulling me towards the tan colour - the closest thing I can think of would be the base colour used on Overhaulin's CNN hummer - I'm already pretty much decided that if I go with the dark grey, I'll polish the hell out of this grille, and if I go with the tan, then I'll make it black to give lots of contrast and a good breakup between the outer colour and the frosted acrylic....

I also noticed with this mockup that it's possible the lobo lettering will be less clear because of the core of the fan, so I added some colour to it - not sure what colour in the final version but for now, the red stands out so you can see my point...