Scratch Build – In Progress Project "Untitled", UPDATE FINALLY! 16/12/2010 Motherboardtray done

05/11/10

Hi people, I've decided to create my first scratch build and water cooled pc called Project "Untitled." It’s received this name as I've never been good with cool names so I thought the default save title for word documents would at least give it a humourus twist.
Anyway my plan is to create a small-medium sized, slick, stylish computer that will surve my every need including 3d design and gaming.

I started the project by creating a roughish sketch up model of the case to get the right shape, sizes and general layout. I left certain details like the backplate design until later. A few key features of the case will include, a aluminium square tubing skeleton, with all the sheet metal riveted to it except the side panels whichwill simple screw in. The idea behind this is to creat a strong and spacious case. I also plan to have a motherboard tray running from one side of the case to the other, creating a sort of screen hiding ugly bits like hdd, 5.25” drives and all the wiring. It will also be compartmentalised, with the bottom compartment housing the water cooling gear, power supply and lower front fan, while the top compartment will hold all the major hardware, motherboard set up, HDD’s, 5.25” bays and several fans.

Below are a few print screens of the sketch up model, however I mainly used it for hardware placement and general sizing, so theres not heaps of detail or rendering.








I plan to include a nice array of the newest and fastest components, thanks to a generous student scholarship and grant I've received lol.
Hardware:
CPU: Intel Core i7 970 3.20GHz
Motherboard: Asus Rampage III Gene Intel X58
Ram: Patriot Viper 6GB
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 470
Hdd: 2*Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB, 1*Intel X25-M Mainstream 80GB
Ps: 1020W Enermax Revolution85+
Water cooling:
CPU Block: Swifttech Apogee XT extream REV2 Waterblock
GPU Block: Intergrated in GPU
Radiator: EK CoolStream Radiator XT 360
Pump: Swiftech Laing D5 Vario
Resevoir: whatever one looks good =p

By the way I do accept my photo’s are bit rubbish, they are done on my 5mega pixel phone and if anyone has any questions at all please message me.

Before I start big thanks to my grand dad who’s helping me with this build as he’s alot more “practically minded” than me.
So to start with I’m going to cut and sand some square aluminium tubing into five pieces to create the front parts of the skeleton.




Following this I then cut six brackets out of a 2.5m piece of angeled aluminium and drilled holes in both sides, as well as holes in the skeleton tubing.




I then riveted the brackets to the three smaller bars. Here’s one of them.


Following this I lined the two larger bars up and the three smaller bars and riveted them all together to give me my first bit of skeleton.


To achieve this frame however I did have to slightly modify my rivet gun to get it to fit. By slightly modify I mean sand the top completely flat .



I then repeated the whole process so I had two identical pieces of skeleton.


The next job is to cut ,sand and drill six pieces of aluminium tubing, followed by cutting and drilling 12 brackets and then rivet the two together. These Six Bars will connect the two ends of the skeleton and complete it. Here’s one of the Six Bars finished.


Finally I riveted the two ends and six cross supports together and got my finished skeleton.


Next step is to start sheet metal work, which is needed as some of my skeleton is twisted slightly, and needs pulling into position. However that will be my next entry. Hope people like it so far.[/SIZE]

 

Been mulling over a scratch build for a while now so will be watching yours closely.

Do please post hints and tips and let us know not only how to do things, but how not to do things (should you be unlucky)

Mod on

 

I will do from now on mate. First lesson I learnt was to measure twice, cut once lol. I had to sand couple bits tubing down due to lack concentration.

On the whole though it's going well mainly as a result of extensive planning and good advice from my grand dad.

Also thanks for my first reply =p.

 

Great start,I cant wait to see more from this.

 

Cheers, there shud be some on first bit of sheet metal tomorrow. Only just got round to creating the thread today due to Uni and rowing commitments.

Cheers for comment.

 

UPDATE: Sheet Metal

I'm back again with a update. Started the sheet metal for the case on Friday and decided that the bottom would be good place to start so...

I started by getting my aluminium sheeting (500m*500m*1.2mm) and measure out the outline of the bottom. (I got it real cheap from a great site, so just ask if you want to know the site name.)



Following this I clamped the sheet to a workmate and started to cut it with a jigsaw. Initially I tried to use some clamped wood as a guide to make the line nice and smooth, however this didn't seem to work very well.



So when cutting the top of the floor panel I simply did it by eye which made a much closer cut.



I then draw filed the two sides that had been cut and marked out where the holes had to be drilled for the rivets, and drilled them. (I did get carried away when doing this first bit of sheeting and didn't take many pics. I will try and take more on the next piece of sheet metal. SORRY GUYS!)

I then clamped the piece of sheeting to the skeleton floor and made sure twisted bits of tubing were clamped into the right position.



I then used a hand drill to drill holes in the skeleton tubing and riveted the sheet down. I pre-drilled the sheeting so that I could use those holes as an exact guide for the holes that needed to be drilled in the skeleton. This enabled the sheet to fit on almost perfectly, only needing a small amount of filing on one side to make it fit perfect.

Here's a picture of the skeleton with the floor panel attatched.



That's it for now but I should be doing the next floor panel tuesday so next update shouldn't be long. Also if anyone knows where I can get a ABRA FILE saw blade from,would be a big help. Need it for bit metal soon.

Anyways cya soon

 

Another sheet metal update!

I havn't had a update for about a week, mainly because I had a slight problem with a piece of sheet metal and didn't want to post about it half done so.

I started to make the floor for the bottom compartment by cutting the same standard rectangle sheet as the bottom of the case.





Now I have the sheet I had to mark out the corners i needed to cut away to fit round the skeleton and brackets.



I then cut the corners out.



I then filed the corners away until they fitted in the case. Here's were I hit a major problem. Like a fool I totally forgot to mark which side of the sheet was the top and which was the front. So after filing and checking several times, I realized my mistake and marked the sheet. By then I had filed to much away on 3 out of the 4 corners.

To fix this problem I went ahead drilling and riveting the sheet to the case. I then used a modeling filler called milliput to fill the corners and edge that had gone wrong.


Drilling and riveting.


This is the sheet plainly not fitting.


Here is my grand dad preparing the milliput. Milliput works by mixing two compounds together into a sort of putty, which is then used to fill the gaps. It then hardens and is sanded away to leave a smooth and sharp edge /face.


Here's the finished putty u get and simply fill the gaps with.

Here is the sheet metal filled. I will sand it down in my next update due to the time it needs to dry.



Now that the bottom compartment floor was fixed (saved) I started on the upper compartment floor panel. I started by creating the same rectangle sheet as before. I then marked the corners that needed cutting. This time however it only had to fit around the skeleton as the brackets were underneath.



This time I initially marked the sheet before filing it, so it slotted into position perfectly this time (learning from the earlier disaster lol). I then clamped it to the skeleton and drilled, then riveted it to the skeleton.



That brings the project up to date, with only needing the roof panel to finished all the big pieces of horizontal sheet metal. As you can see teh builds really startign to progress . I can't wait to start cutting the motherboard tray and side panels soon.

 

Nice update

Just 1 tip, Take ur time !

 

Yeah I've seen some pretty amazing stuff done with Milliput, its more or less an epoxy clay. Seems to be awesome stuff, glad you found a good use for it!

 

Lots of potential, and I love scratch builds so.... subbed

 

Nice Job so far keep it up, and im glad your learning from your mistakes. I am also happy to see that your spending time with your Grandfather, Older people have a lot of knowledge to pass on so listen to him and consider what he says. I envy you I miss having my grandfather around and wish I had spent more time with him after I left home for the military. Subbed I am also considering a scratch build so ill be watching.

 

Lol I know what you mean. After that incident I'm taking things much slower lol.

Cheers for the comment.

 

Yeah, I dunno if I put this in update but my g-dad makes model trains so he's got pritty much everything you would need to build stuff.

It's an excellent tool for fixing mistakes as I've found lol.

Cheers for comment.

 

I agree, older people have wealths of knowledge to learn from. It's why I got my g-dad to help me in the first place.

This is my first scratch build and tbh it's not massively difficult as long as you plan in detail. I've been designing this project on sketchup for like 6 months lol, and finally got to this final design.

Cheers for comment btw.

 

Glad I've caught this one at the start, things are looking good. Looks like its gonna be a nice clean cut build with plenty under the hood and looking forward to seeing all the water cooling goodies go in! Nice work Bearjew

 

cheers for the support. I caught a look of your project the other day, it looks pretty beasty! Gona be good

 

Sheet Metal update (Roof,ront,back and fans)

Hi again, this update is actually saying what i did on Friday as I havn't had anytime to write it up until now.

First of all my five Revotec 120mm white led fans arrived on Friday so here's a couple pictures of those bad boys. I decided to use Revotec 120mm fans as they recieved a excellent review in Custompc, excelling on both cooling and price.




Following the last update I then went about sanding down the milliput as it had hardened. I used some sort of fine grit sand paper. Think my grand dad said it was wet&dry or something similar (I'm still pretty bad with technical terminology lol.) Anyways the result was perfect and gave a great finish.




Next i went about the process of cutting out the roof panel. This was actually done twice, as the first peice was 1mm out on the long edge, mainly as a result of me measuring about 3 lines and sawing along the wrong one. My measuring ability is still developing, however the metal will be recycled into the custom hdd caddy. (Hopefully making it in the next week or two). So once the second one was cut I clamped it to the top of the case to check the fit and filed a few little overhangs of.



Next I measured the width of the Revotec fan blades with some electronic callipers to work out how big the top panel exaust holes needed to be. If i remeber rightly it was something like 10-11cm diameter. I then drew out the circles and marked the interior that needed to be cut out.



I didn't really want to jigsaw the fan holes out, mainly because of the large amount of filing and I wanted a really perfect circle. So my grand dad luckily has a friend who's going to punch out all the holes I need doing for me.

So I then needed to get started on the front and back plates, so they could be given to me grand dad's friend to be punched. I cut out the front panel same as usual, measuring, jigsawing and filing down. I then measured out the centres of the two front 140mm intake holes. However I can't draw the circles out yet, as without the 140mm fans I can't measure the fan lenghs. I marked the centre for all the circles using a cool little centring device my grand dad has. It has a lense with a crosshair on so you can find the centre very accurately and then rotate it round to a metal pin that you smack to create a perfectly centred dent.



I then decided to cut the back plate out as well, however I didn't have time to file the cut side down.



This brings the log up to date with the top panel almost done, just needing the fan holes punched, rivet holes drilled and a fillport put in sometime. I also have the front panel cut to size but needs everything cut into it and the back plate just about cut to size. However on Monday I'm expecting the motherboard, PS, remaining fans and a couple of small extra's. This means I can finish the fan holes of and send them of for punching and start on the motherboard tray and hdd caddy.


The top , front and back panels are just stuck on with blu-tack to show you the overall progress

So I hope people are still enjoying my log and another update should be coming Tuesday. Again if anyones got any questions about the project or needs clarification on something just comment

until next time

 

Nice frame u got there!
The filler and the sanding worked out nice!

Following this one!

 

Cheers!

Yeah i was really happy with the way the sanding came out. Didn't take to long either,

Cheers for the comment ^^

 

Update! Custom HDD Caddy

Hello again people. Initially today I was hoping to finish of the fan blow holes so I could send them to my contact for punching. However unfortunately my package hasn't been dispatched yet so I don't have the fans I need.

So instead I decided to start the HDD caddy, using the old front panel which was 1mm too small if you remeber. So I designed the caddy about two weeks ago and I'm bending metal to make it. This is because I only realized my grand dad had a bender once I started my project, otherwise I would of bent more metal, making my job easier lol.

Here are the sketch up models of the HDD caddy.


View from the front at an angle


Front view


Back view at an angle

The idea is that it holds 2 regular HDD and a SSD in a 2.5" to 3.5" converter. It fits in the case side ways and hidden by the full case motherboard. It also has windows cut in to allow air from the top 140mm intake fan to pass through, cooling the HDD's, and passing into the main body of the case and behind the motherboard. I'm bending the whole caddy out of one piece of metal, using angle bar to act as supports, with 1mm foam to cancel vibration and pieces of bent aluminium to act as HDD stops at the back.

So to start with here's a picture of the bender, which my grand dad had custom made about ten years ago.



I started by cutting out a 1:1 scale replicare in carboard and started to make the bends. I did this to check all the bends could be done in the bender and see what order they need to be done in. To my delight it worked perfect.




Carboard caddy, half done


Carboard caddy with broken HDD in it lol.

I then drew out the bends and outline of the caddy on the old front panel.



Next I drew out the caddy windows ready to be cut out.



I then drilled two holes, one in each window, using a step drill and cut one of the windows out using an Abrafile saw blade or multi-directional saw blade. Basically it's a round hack saw blade that can cut in any direction. Unfortunately it's an old one and no where sells them so if you know where to get one TELL ME PLZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!




That edge is straight lol. It's just a visual illusion.

And that's all for this update. Hopefully by Friday I should get my package and I can carry on with the fan blow holes. Again if anyone has any questions, specially about the HDD caddy, just ask.

Cheers for reading and if anyone knows where to get that saw blade from please please tell me ^^.