Scratch Build – In Progress * r e f l e X i o n *

http://portal.fciconnect.com/portal/page/portal/FcicntPublic/HomePage

All the caps are now polished, and it looks like my board is wearing jewelry.

I'll upload some pictures tomorrow evening. I'll also be setting up my own paint booth to take care of those slot connectors. I'm just going to spray them all black.

 

Bling-bling.






MMMmmm. Polished caps and CPU socket. This took a while and a lot of care, but I think that it turned out very well. There are still a couple that I can't get to so easily that I'll have to polish by hand. I used my dremel and a polishing wheel for most of the work on these, along with some aluminum polish.

A few more shots.





The polish goes on in a paste, then dries. So when buffing it off it created a lot of dust. So I used a combination of compressed air, paper towels and isopropyl alcohol to clean off all the excess from the PCB.

Tonight I picked up some painting supplies, as I'll be tackling those red connectors in the next day or two.



I'll cover the pcb with that plastic sheeting and tape it all down with masking tape before spraying.

I couldn't believe my luck, but I found some spray paint made for acrylic and plastic, with no sanding or priming required!



Music to my ears.

More to come.

 

Wow man looks awesome. Won't spraying the sockets get paint into the internal connectors, and then render them unusable?

 

Not if you tape over them.

 

Looks good with all the bling - makes you wish that manufacturers could provide such a motherboard themselves.

Anyway, I'm thinking that polishing the CPU socket was not necessary (unless you're REALLY anal and a true (read: kinda sick) perfectionist), since it won't be viewable due to the waterblock, you're gonna install?

Always, really anxious to see how the painting of the connectors will come out. Hard to tell, but I'm fearing you cannot control 100% where the paint will flow. And I'm also afraid that it, despite being made especially for plastics, won't stick THAT good to the plastic connectors through the course of time - I mean, with all the heat and removing/installing of cards. Personally, I would have gone for replacing all the plastic connectors, but I do realize that some of them (the PCI and PCI-E connectors in particular) are impossible to replace. But, in that case there ARE slot protectors that will conceal the evil red colour AND protect those unused slots from dust 'n grit and what-so-ever. But that still leaves the colour of those slots that are in use - sigh... it's a pickle! So let's see what you can do to remedy the situation. I'm sure it'll be nothing short of spectacular!

 

I really love what you've done with this so far mate. I'm sure I don't need to remind you to be careful when painting those memory slots - I've delved into component modification before and didn't take enough care over it, which ended in me damaging a graphics card. Your work on the board so far looks stunning, I eagerly await more updates

 

Just an idea but couldn't you use some kind of water-resistant black pen on the RAM-slots and the PCI-E-slots you are going to use and cover up the unused? If you paint several layers with the pen it should be all black and pretty even. It would be safer and probably look better.
Something like this:

 

It only took me two minutes to polish the CPU socket.

It was done mainly for the photo session, but keep in mind that I'm using a plexi block, so you will still be able to see behind it. And I'll be taking a lot of very detailed pictures of the completed build. So while this kind of attention to detail may not be required by most, I consider it required in this case since my lens picks up every little imperfection.

Thanks, Unicorn. I truly appreciate your feedback.

Yes, I plan to be very, very, very careful before painting the slots. After all the work I've put into this board, it'd be a shame to kill it.

Thanks for the suggestion, Aterius. I haven't used that specific pen, but I did try a sharpie the other night, and it didn't turn out well at all. You can clearly see the pen marks. I just haven't seen anything that leaves a smooth finish such as paint will.

Teaser:

 

I'd be especially careful with the Krylon - It's got really weak in the last few years. It's still good, but it doesn't stand up to nearly as much as it used to.

Regardless of what you decide to do, it is one hell of a nice looking project - I look forward to seeing it completed.

 

This must be one of the projects with most atention to details I have ever seen! And the quality in your work is just stunning! Keep it up!

 

For the ram slot why not just use a brush like what auto scratch repair use?

 

Thanks for the suggestions and compliments, guys.

Beast -- how big is the brush, and how fine does it paint?

The problem with both the DIMM slots and the PCI-e slots is that there are tiny little pinholes along the top ridge of the connector that you can't get paint in as the pins are sticking into them. This means that you can't paint along that top ridge, so if it's exposed in any way then things are going to look off if the rest of the slot is painted.

The good thing about the DIMM slots is that the RAM slides right down on top of them so they aren't exposed. So you can just paint the sides of the slots and be good. Not so with the PCI-e as you can still see around the connector when the card's in place.

I have my eye on another mobo that I may be going with if I can't get this Foxconn to look the way I want it to. I hate to have to go with another board after all the work I've put into this one, but the red connectors on this board stick out like a sore thumb when combined with my color scheme that I'm using.

Aside from painting various spare plastic connectors for practice tonight, I've began reassembling the case with the Zero Gravity Chamber installed to see how everything looks. Luckily, everything is fitting pretty exact to the original measurements that were taken when I was constructing the chamber. Huge sigh of relief on that one.

I took several shots tonight of the assembly in action. This one turned out the best. Hope you enjoy.

 

Man that looks fantastic! Can't wait to see the finished article. Will be interesting to see how you go about painting those slots, like you said getting the PCI-e slots right sounds like tricky business.

 

Those HDD mounts look the mutts dangly bits!

 

Have you considered using Rit-Dye? It is a fabric dye if I am not mistaken, but I have used it successfully in the past on nylon R/C car parts. If you can get all the bits off that is....

 

Yeah, this whole business with having to paint certain parts of the board is just starting to give me a headache. I've decided to try and sell this board to replace it with an all black eVGA X58, so if anyone is interested in it for 120$ shipped within the US, let me know.

Thanks, NaloaC! (That's a compliment, right? )

Haven't tried that yet. Thanks for the suggestion.


RAM coolers came in today from Performance-PCs. They look really good.



They're not all pictured, but there's 3 of them for 3 DDR-3 sticks that I'm running in triple channel.

I wanted to see what they looked like installed on the motherboard. Since it's necessary to remove the heat spreaders from the RAM first before installing them, that's what I began to do.



The heat spreaders came off quite easily. These were the OCZ Gold sticks that I'm using.

A shot of the RAM cooler from the top.



I'll be running Bitspower rotaries into these since they'll be stacked so close together on the board.

Here's a shot of the entire heat spreader removed from the RAM.



The coolers come with thermal pads, but the ones they shipped are too thick to use with double-sided memory, so I'll have to see if I can pick up some thinner pads tomorrow.

And it's snowing again here. Can't believe it. It's snowed 4 times in the past 1.5 months. That's unheard of for this area.

Night, all.

 

Pretty small since you're dealing with small/fine automotive scratches


That was the best pic I could find

 

Looking very shiny, maybe I'm easily impressed but this looks cool

 

What a deal. I'm not in the US (yet) but I'm definitely interested. Could you link me to the manufacturer (or Newegg) page for this board?

 

I would also love to take this board off your hands for an upcoming project, as the colours on it (prediminantly red and black) would suit the theme perfectly. Unfortunately though, it will probably cost as much to ship it to me here in the UK as it would to buy a new one from a UK supplier.

Could you tell me what type or brand of metal polish you used on the capacitors? I tried this on an Asus P6T Deluxe this morning with 1) Auto Glym general purose metal polish and 2) Meguiars metal polish for manifolds and exhaust tips. I find it takes a lot of both polish and action with the dremel to get a mirrored finish like you have. Was this the case when you were polishing yours up? There are 75+ caps on the P6TD so it could take quite a while, but it is a massive improvement. As someone has already said, most motherboards feature too many different colours which makes them look ugly, and the Asus is no exception. It's a great board but unfortunately asethetics was obviously not considered when it was being designed.

[edit]

Sorry, I missed it in this photo. I wonder if I could get something similar over here. It definately sems to do the trick better than what I'm using.