Scratch Build – In Progress Project FiveWood - Complete!!

I have decided to post this work-log on bit-tech.net as I have just recently discovered this site. The project is in progress, but has a way to go yet. I am looking forward to hanging out here and learning from the fine craftsmanship I see here.

CC

Project FiveWood

Okay, here comes my first mod/build for 2008.

Project FiveWood: While I am a big golf fan (I play 2 to 5 times a week), this project has nothing to do with golf despite the name.

The name is derived from my desire to use as many different types of wood as possible in this project.
The following types/kinds of wood will NOT be used:

-any type of pine
-ash
-MDF
-plywood
-veneers

The wood types I know I will be using include:

-mahogany
-white oak
-red oak
-cracked walnut
-maple

That covers at least five to justify the name anyway. I imagine I'll be mixing in some other types as I go along.
My intention is to use wood in almost every part of the build.
I won't use the waterjet for wood cuts. Wood tends to swell on the waterjet anyway.
This was to be Project Bubinga, but at $14/board foot. I would have to make the case very very small.

Why?

As I mentioned above, I just got finished with the Phase III project.
Lots of metal work there and it was my FIRST project with that much aluminum.
Granted, it utilized the waterjet a lot and I love the waterjet, but I found out how difficult it can be to prep and finished aluminum.
I'm glad I did it, I learned a lot, but I've been missing my wood working projects.

Another thing I'm going to do here is "shoot from the hip" a little more.
I usually do a lot of design planning, but I am going to do what's necessary up front and then let the creative "juices" flow.
This means I'll probably wind up with a book shelf instead of a computer case, but it will be a nice one.
_________________

 

the beginning

As I said, I'm doing the bare minimum for design planning.

Here's where things started:



It doesn't look like much, but it let me get thinking anyway.
I used my regular software (Lightwave3D) to get dimensions so that I know things will fit:

mockup A


mockup B


mockup drive bays



These are all mocked up for dimensions and I imagine I will change these as I go along.
I intend to connect the parts together using dowels so that I can 'tack' the parts together without permanently gluing anything until I have to.
This allows a lot of flexibility in the build.

 

more progress

The good part is when I've got something to do in the shop. Now that I have some idea of what I'm gonna do, I can start making saw dust.

Here's some of the wood I'll be using for this project:






It looks like a pile of scrap until I get it cleaned up.

rough plane it:



Split it up:



Here I have the frame parts cut up and planed down:



Here's one of my favorites, the cracked walnut.
This wood comes in bricks that are 5" x 5" x 10".
These are pieces too small to use for gun stock so I can get them for about $4.
This one I have planed on four sides to clean it up:



then split it up:



I'll use this for accents and decorative parts of the front panel.

 

Nice choice of woods. I'm interested to see how this door turns out.

 

cc3d,

Very nice start, and you have a very nice selection of pieces. I see a dowel in the picture. Are you planning on using doweled joints for the rails and stiles?

Also, what do you plan to make the cages out of? Wood? I would really like to see that and get some tips.

 

and...

I then started to get the frame pieced together so that I can get the marks for the dowels so I can start drilling holes.

What I'm going for here is just the frame itself:



Here I'm just fitting stuff together to check the cuts:



I've got the bottom and top pieces framed up:



Here I've got the frame "framed up":



Here it is just pieced together using dowels with NO glue. I'm avoiding glue as long as I can.
If you look here, the frame has verticals that are mahogany and horizontals that are white oak.
I plan to keep the wood selection mixed up this way.

Well, I've caught the build log up on this project. As I progress, I'll keep posting updates.

 

and....

My plan is to keep the frame in "mock-up" form and work on the inside structure for this case. So I've started with the 3.5" Drive bay.

The rough design is as so:



I started with a mockup. I cut 2 different side panels and cut single slat rails for the drives.



After the glues dries, I cut the side panels apart and trimmed the edges:



I then put it together with quick clamps to test the concept and measurements:



This will work. So I started with the mohogany:




Here I've got the walnut worked into the center:

I've still got to do some trimming and sanding and add more accents of walnut.
Here, I've got maple rails rough cut and placed to check measurements.

I'm going to go back and work on the side panels a little more before gluing these in.

More later....CC

 

How thick are the white oak rails (horz) and mahogany stiles (vert) pieces? They look like about 3/4". Did you use 1 dowel or 2 for each piece?

 

nice wood, going to use any zebra or cherry?

 

Thank you, you're about to see a time warp here shortly. I've got a lot more to post to catch this thread up.

to answer your questions, yes and yes.

CC

 

more like ~1/4" thick and 2 dowels.

No zebra wood yet

 

and..

Thinking some more about the final look. Here's Some updated concept images.









More work on the 3.5" Drive bay as well. This build is going to take more time than I originally planned and this is okay. I just need the extra time to be able to spend the time necessary to make everything right. With wood projects, I always take a little longer. I'm pushing the expected completion date (ECD)out to 3.15.08

Here I am cutting the top and bottom pieces to fit on the 3.5" drive bay.



I'm using the old technique of cutting plastic templates to cut the wood by.












While working on this, I also started on the 5.25" drive bay. Same deal, just wider and shorter.



Here I've got the parts rough-cut and pieced together.



Once I have the sides of the drive bay ready, I make the rails twice as long and glue them to both the sides sitting next to each other. This way, I can cut between the two side panels and the rails will be better aligned.



Here I've got some stand-in optical drives to check measurements.



more to come.....

CC

 

well....

Progress? Not much, but I did get my Sony D717 camera back.
This is a 4 year old 6 mb digital that is my favorite of all digital cameras.
I've been using a few others including 2 Canon 6mb and 8mb cameras, bit this Sony takes better pictures.
The CCD went out on it about two months ago. I checked the Sony website and found they were supporting a recall on this camera.

I sent it in and viola! They sent my camera back with a brand new body! So I did a few things to warrant taking a couple of pictures to post.

Here's where the 5.25" drive bay stands now.




and the 3.5" drive bay (nothing is lacquered yet)



Here's a part of subproject "sunshine".

This is what I am building to test some ideas I have for a very important part of this build.

Can you guess what that may be?



more to come...

C

 

I've been kind of jumping around on things for this project. I've had to do a lot of little test items to see if my ideas will work.

Anyway, I decided to knock out the motherboard tray. Again, I am building a component without really knowing how this will mount into the case. I had planned to make it up as I go and this will work out fine I'm sure.

Here's the board I built from joining red oak and mahogany. I used my surface planer to get to about 0.20" thick.



I pulled out some polystyrene for making a motherboard template. When I was cutting these things with a waterjet, it required that I measured out the motherboard and make a CAD drawing to cut from. This time, I'm going analog.




I'm going to put an eVGA 780i motherboard in this build. I used my spare 680i to mark out the template. Both are standard ATX form and identical in almost every way physically.




Marked up polystyrene



Cut and drilled polystyrene



I marked it up for future use.



Marking up the wood for the cutting!



and here is the rough cut motherboard tray. I always leave a big hole behind the CPU so I can easily mount CPU cooling without having to remove the motherboard. After this step, I tested the strength of this tray before subjecting it to sanding and....



...I broke it in half! Alright! So, I'm gluing again. Oh well, that's why I tested it.





I thought I'd take a moment to show off an old 'mod'. In my shop at home, I needed a computer. Why? I don't know, music, podcast, internet access, we always need a PC nearby right?!



Here is a shot of the monitor. I took an old 15 inch LCD I had and tore it apart. Right down to nothing but the screen and electronics. I had a frame I had made that fit it nicely. I then mounted it over this workbench.



I've got an old laptop (PIII 933 MHz with 512 Mb RAM) mounted below the workbench with an on/off switch extended out for easy access.




I took an old (yes, everything's old) keyboard tray/ monitor stand and extracted the drawer portion. I mounted this under my workbench so I can tuck it out of the way.



Viola!! It's nice to be able to have this running in there. I have it on a wireless NIC to get on my home network. Not exactly an extreme mod, but quite functional.



Alright, I'll have more progress soon.

C

 

Things are moving slow and sure.

I finished enough of the motherboard tray so that I could work out placement. I've still got to glue up the trim items and put the lacquer finish on it of course.



Here I'm just placing the trim items for reference.

I also began work on the bottom tray. This tray will have a wire path and air flow path below the 'false' bottom of the case.

I've just got things jumbled in here for fitting. Nothing glued.

If you're looking for Christmas and birthday gift ideas for me, I'd say that I never have enough clamps.

I started tracing out a back-slot panel, I am not sure why yet.

Here, I traced the back profile of the frame onto polystyrene, This lets me square up the back, clamp it down and then trace it.

Here's my reference for building the back panel.

A little razor action.

Here's the back panel blank I build. This has mahogany and walnut joined up.

A little glue and a little planing will make this work.

The trace out for the scroll saw.

Here's the trace out for the fan-mount panel for the top of the case.

and a little more razor action.



Here's a glimpse of the next mod. Just testing hardware right now. This is the guts of an old Dell. Runs well with OpenSUSE.

 

02.01.08

Okay, I've been jumping all over the place. I'm still on target to get this project completed by the end of February. It'll be a push, but I won't have to be a hasty push.

Here's my plan for the top of the case. The top will have two panels. This will be the bottom-most panel.


This requires maple with holes. I couldn't find any maple with holes in it already, so I made my own.

I used the hole cutting bit to make the holes and here, I tried to use it to cut rings. Looks nice in this picture, but didn't turn out so well.

So, I ended up cutting these rings on the scroll saw. these are mahogany and I hope they look a little more towards the red side when they're lacquered.

As seen on TV, I want to have a walnut stripe down the center of this panel. These fit well and it will show once I level everything.

I also headed back over to the frame to start figuring out how to mount the motherboard. This WILL work somehow.



Here, the motherboard tray is 'pegged' into place. I should be able to mount the motherboard tray without glue. (That's a good thing)

And while I was at it, I decided to trim up the top panel on the band saw. While doing so, the brand new blade I installed went BOOM!

Here's a sight you don't want to see. That's my blood on the blade. When breaking, the blade must have whipped over and went into and back out of my ring finger. This happened so fast that I almost didn't know it happened. That was until I felt the pressure and saw this nice set of 14 mm lacerations on the end of my ring finger.

Enhanced by a lot of drippy blood!

I would like to show you a picture of the lacerations, but I HAD to leave before I could take any pictures. Plus, my other hand was busy applying pressure to the wound. After a trip to the doctor and a half dozen stitches, I'm back to normal. Well, actually I've got this big dumb bandage on my finger and it is begging to get caught in some other piece of equipment.

I practice safety strictly in my shop. You just have to. **** does happen. Safety glasses are a pain to keep up with, but so are seeing eye dogs. Gloves get in the way, but can be the difference between bad lacerations and accidental dismemberment.

While this wound was certainly no life-changing injury, it did occur to me how close I may have come to losing a digit there. I love every digit on my hands. I play guitar and I play golf among many other things that require great digits. My first thought was to leave the band saw as is and make due with my other equipment for a while. So, I changed the blade on the band saw (I'm taking the other back) and finished trimming the top panel. I got it trimmed, but this friggin bandage sticks out like a sore ....thumb?! It is in the way. Anyway, I got right back on that horse.



Next time.

 

02.07.08

Okay, while it may seem that I cut my finger and quit working. The truth is that I have made some progress on Project FiveWood, but I have been working on some shop related things that got in the way. I quickly built a cabinet/stand for my table saw so that I could better catch the saw dust it expels. This was necessary before I moved on with wood cutting in the shop.



Additionally, I have been working on parts of the FiveWood project that I will show later (surprise!) There are parts of this project that I will spring on you when they're closer to done. This will insure 2 things; 1) I can actually do these cools ideas I'm holding back on and 2) I can get that WOW impact I'm always looking for



Well, enough of that blah, blah, blah. I got a little hung up on the back panel. Things are coming along.


I've done more work to get the motherboard tray finished. This is the backside of the motherboard tray, what will be seen from outside the case. Here are things placed before gluing.

Here I've got it a little closer to complete.

Much work has gone into the bottom tray/panel of the case. Here you see the recessed bottom.

Here's the cover plate for the bottom panel/tray. We'll see what that recessed area is for later.

I threw things together for a mockup to get some inspiration. Instead I ended up saying, "what the hell was I thinking here" and so forth. Looks like I may be re-working some things.

I have moved the completion date up to February 25. This is earlier than my last prediction of March 15. Why? I don't know other than I want this rig into competition for March 1. I'm not real confident I can make that date. We'll see.

 

02.17.08

I've been real busy with this project. Again, you're not going to see everything I've been working on. I still plan to spring some things on you later.

I went ahead and framed in that backside of the PSU port on the back panel.


I've rough framed this in using walnut which contrast well to the mahogany back panel. I'll fill in the cracks and sand it down next.

I've also put more work in to the top panel. This panel is made of maple with mahogany and walnut accents.

While I have had the 3.5" and 5.25" drive bays complete for a while, I have since decided to re-design them. As stated before, the precious design did not integrate well into the case frame.



Here are my CAD drawings for the new design. This is a new software package call Nap Kin 2.0.


As usual, I roughed out the design in scrap wood. Here I have marked up some spare pine to test the process and the concept to insure I'm not off track here.

Here is the pine after routing. The reason I do this is to be sure my process of guide routing the slots is sound and repeatable. What you see is one board that is both sides of the drive bays.

After routing the slots, I will cut the board down the center line so that I have the right and left sides of the drive bays. This insures that the slots will be perfectly aligned. I did this with the mock-up pine drive bay. I don't have the images of that, but you can guess it worked.

So ...I started the process again with a finely planed piece of maple.

Here I have 2 boards aligned and screwed down before marking so that nothing will move during the critical measurements and routing the slots. I use this fine piece of aluminum as a fence for the router.

Here the first couple of slots are cut. Things look rough now, but just wait and see what I end up with (I hope anyway).

Here, most of the slots are cut.

Now I have finished the slots and have trimmed the side panels to their working dimensions.

I put a couple of 5.25" drives in to make sure I get the spacing between side panels correct.

ditto for the 3.25" drives.

With all the parts of the drive bay assembly complete, I can start making it look good. I've cut a slot down the center of the biggest panel of the drive bay.

Now I can fit a nice strip of mahogany in this slot. I'll trim this out with ...WALNUT! I love walnut!

Here's an idea of where I'm going with this. This is as much as I've got to show of the drive bays. I have many little pieces of walnut cut to trim this out and I'll show that soon.

On another note, on my trip this week to collect more interesting wood for this and other projects, I came across this beauty. It's cedar and while it may not show so well here, this is a nice white bordered purple grained piece. Smells good too!

 

02.23.08

Badda bing badda boom, badda badda or whateva!

I guess it's safe to say I am going to miss my target date of 3.25.08. Of course, the shoemaker's elves may show up tonight while I am sleeping and finish this build for me. Id that happens, I'll have to post the results as these elves don't normally photograph their work.

I picked up where I left off with the drive bays. Now it's time to add some BLING to the drive bay assembly. Here's the start of my first idea. It's a bad idea, so I scratch it.



I started with this idea next. This is the current plan, I may stick with it as the creative juices are flowing on this one right now. I do intend to have the knotted sections involved,

Here, I am adding some copper to the back of this walnut. This will give it some Pop! that's needed here.

After cutting the copper to size, I brushed it down for that..uh..brushed copper look. I am currently flattening this copper out so that I can tack it down well. Next, I will prep this drive bay with sanding primer before putting it together and then applying some polyurethane.

The next section I have started work on is the modular, dynamic, side-panels (nice name huh? Sounds slick, hope it works!). The idea is that the side panels are easily interchangeable and swapped out. Similar to any other case where the side panel can be removed. I am first building a generic frame that attaches and detaches from the side of the case. To this frame will be attached the door/hatch/plexiglass that allows access to the interior of the machines.

I hope you can see the idea in these GIF animations below. If they are not working on this site, click HERE to see them.



Probably not so exciting here. I cut 4 runners for the generic frame assembly. Two are white oak and two are mahogany.

This frame will be attached to the case via hammered dowels. These dowels will be very tight to hold the frame snuggly without the need for glue (so I can remove it as necessary later on).



So I have the frame of the whatcha macallit side panel cut and drilled so that I can attach / detach it via dowels. [You're looking at the case frame as it lies on its side with the case front on the left side of the image]

I really have been quite busy on this project. It's not so apparent in the last few postings, but I have not been posting all the work I've been doing. I do have a couple of elements of this project I want to spring on you when they're done. I have been working hard on those as well.

 

02.25.08

If you remember, I have this concept for a four-part dynamic panel. I will dub this the Barkley Panel as it is inspired by an idea a friend of mine had that's not too far from this concept. I'll give him his due as well as a 2.75% royalty from all net profits!

Here's the Barkley Panel closed.


Here's the Barkley Panel opened.

First I wanted to convert my 3D design to something a little more sophisticated. I'd love to tell you why I use green paper, but it's really quite complicated (and boring).




First I cut some nice slats. <---These 6 words represent about 90 minutes of work. I didn't take pictures of that work and won't bore you with all the details, but I just realized that I can blow past this amount of work with 6 simple words. I didn't want to write that I rip-split some boards, planed them down, cut some 2" x 42" slats, mitered them down and blah blah blah (well, I wrote it anyway)

Whenever it is necessary to do something 4 times exactly the same way, it requires a nice jig. I settled for a sufficient jig. I have these delrin squares and t-squares I made on the waterjet. They also work real well as framing jig parts. I took double-sided tape (a GREAT product) and secured them to a polystyrene sheet for this quick framing jig.

So, viola! Four nice square frames. Now I can make a wooden Windows Logo!!

I placed these on the panel frame that I made last time. Here I have not installed them, just placed for positioning.

I then clamped them down so that I can start playing with the trim work. Here I have some rough-cut walnut (and a chunk of stainless steel) I am placing to figure out what I will do next.

and that's when I ran out of juice. I'll post more progress on the Barkley Panel soon.