Project: GEARED UP. More tinkering! 10/3.

Good and bad news.

Got a hold of a 6800GT that my Cool-Matic was just waiting to meet.



Problem was that once mounted to the vid card the block wouldn't allow the card to work and the rig would not boot. I spent the better part of a day and a half monkeying around with the setup and also managed to fry a stick of RAM when I sprung a small leak that I didn't get to in time. No big deal there since I just got a wad of cash for a spare box I wasn't using (talk about timing). I think I'll go for 2 1 gig sticks. Photoshop CS2 is a RAM hog. As for the GPU block I don't know what I'm doing wrong but I'll figure it out...later.

The good news was that while I was disassembling and reassembling things I managed to drop the CPU temps by 10 degrees celcuis. I think that I reseated it about 20 times. So that seems to have done the trick.

I did get the Aquadrive LT installed but I haven't added it to the loop as of yet. It helped load for the noisy drive and the temps but I got tired of handling distilled water treated with Innovatek Protect. It has the consistency of antifreeze so the HDD blocks remain dry.

I have plans for a lot of plexi for the interior as seems to be the norm for case mods nowadays. I found a place that does lasercutting for a pretty cheap price. After which I'll try my hand at polishing up those aluminum rings. I'd say I'm about 75% complete with this build.

More later.

 

Well. A little over a month with no updates. Anybody miss me?
Probably not.

Anyways. I finally got off my duff and started polishing those
aluminum gears. It was NOT fun let me tell you. I polished the
first of them by hand until my fingers almost fell off. THEN I got
smart and wrapped my polishing cloth around a sanding block
and just leaned into it. It cut the work down to 20 minutes
per gear from 45.

The before pic.



And After. Check it out.



Looks pretty good if I do say so myself. And I do say so.
I didn't go for the ultra mirror finish like Coolermeister did with
his case but I came pretty close.



There'll be more pics since I still have 8 more gear rings to
polish up. When I get to those I'll try to get more in progress
pics since you guys seem to thrive on those.

AND....

Not that I'm into all the "Oooh! Look what I bought!" stuff but
since I'm slacking with the lack of pics I think I need to make up for
it somehow.

First off is the Hiper PSU I picked up (newly available in the US!). It's NIIIIIIICE! Shiny black and all. The whole things modular with
the exception of the motherboard connection. I won't load up a
bunch of pics here since this thing has been reviewed on other
sites more than enough.



Second is the Deck keyboard I've been typing this post on. I must
say that it is something else. It is much smaller than I thought it
would be but I've got no complaints. It frees up a lot of space.
The feel of the keys cannot be described. VERY responsive.
Overall a very rugged unit. Now when they come out with the
10-key pad I'm snatching up one of those as well. *And as of this
writing they are! Ask ye shall receive.



Lastly I'm on my backup Gigabyte board since I fried the first 2 RAM
sockets due to my spillage last month. It will be the last 754
board I buy. And to put in it I got 2x1gig sticks of Mushkin to
replace the ones I ruined. No pics since thet're in the rig
running. Maybe next time.

Until Later

 

loving the polish job on your gears, how you get the Alu so polished? wouldnt mind doing that on some bits when i get some alu to cut and do some with myself

sorry to hear about the leaks I'm kinda getting ready to do some W/C myself and scared silly about leaks, at the moment only planning to cool CPU and maybe northbrigde

 

mmmmmmm blue black and shiny objects, man such a nice mod. keeping an eye on this.

 

Thanks. Don't worry too much about leakage. It was my own fault. Didn't make sure a connection was as secure as I thought it was.

to get the shine I used various grits of sandpaper 200-600 then went to a polishing compound called Maas. I applied the compound to the surface of the aluminum and polished away. That took a long time to get results. I soon found that wrapping the polishing cloth around a sanding block quickened the polishing process greatly. I layed the gears on a piece of scrap wood and just leaned into it.

 

Vey nice!!! Good Job

Just wondered about those Hiper R's... how loud are the PSU fans?

 

Haven't installed it yet but I'll be swapping out the fans this weekend anyway. The black PSU's don't have LED fans in them. The blue ones do however. Go figure.

 

i always did like this project. great work!

 

Decided to move to the other side of the case and finish the polishing job on the rings on that side.

This time I have a better step-by-step of the process.

Let's start with the obligatory "Before" shot.


This is pretty much raw aluminum. It's pretty soft relatively speaking so It doesn't take as much effort to polish as I thought.

The tools and materials I used are as follows;
Orbital palm sander
Sandpaper-400 grit, 220 grit, 120 grit.
Sanding block
Maas polishing cream
Polishing cloths
Large file



Starting with 120 grit on the sander we end up with...



this at the halfway point.
I used this grit as the metal is lightly gouged up and this knocks the "edge" off. I moved on to the 220 grit and wound up with...



Not a good pic I must admit but maybe you can see the transistion as the paper transitions to a finer grade.



Here is the whole ring done after 220 grit.
I couldn't find any sandpaper to fit on the sander in a finer grade so I have to move on to this.



Sanding block and 400 grit paper.



The ring after a bit of elbow grease was applied to it.

At this stage it is very smooth but you can stil see the swirl marks all throught the piece. On the previous rings I moved on to 600 then 800 grit paper at this point but I was extra thorough this time so I felt the extra grit wasn't necessary. My arms and shoulders were in agreement with me so it was on to the polishing.



Here I simply took a polishing cloth and wrapped it right around the sanding block I was just using.



I applied the polishing cream to the ring thusly.



And after just one go of the sanding block wrapped in polishing cloth we can already see the reflectivity of the new surface of the metal.

A note that while I was polishing I could feel the surface getting smoother as the Maas was doing it's thing. You couldn't see it because of all the black mess but you knew. After a while the black mess went away and you could start to see things in the surface of the metal.

I went about 4 rounds with the polishing before I was satisfied with the results.



Not quite the mirror finish it could be but I'm more than happy with it.



Finishing up I took the rings back to the empty space that they now call home.

I have the rings mounted to the panel with some 6/32 socket head screws and acorn nuts. The mesh is sandwiched between the 2 rings



Here it is mounted back on the side panel. Whaddya think?

Before they were mounted I took a large file to the edges of the rings to smooth things out.

Well that's that. I TILL have the 6 gears to do on the top of the case. When I I do I'll take a bunch of "money" shots. Chris over at Custom Watercuts has been waiting for these to get finished for quite some time. He says that he's gonna feature the case on his site as soon as I get pics to him.

Until next time.

 

Hawt damn. haven't seen this log for a while (shame on me for not sub'ing). I'm glad to see you're still working away on it.

 

cool, nice job there man

 

i'm in love..... thats just simply stunning mate i love it great ideas

 

Thanks guys. Glad to know the hard work is appreciated.

 

You can probably use that electric discharge plate thing from the PSU's 12V supply rail - it would almost certainly be rectifiying the input to DC.

Can you provide a good closeup pic of the components on the PCB?

 

I like it very much!

Nice ideas, contrary to some others I like how you put the power supply wires in the clear tubes (without any covering so you see red-yellow-black)

 

I'll see if I can dig it up. I did some rearranging in the house and now I cannot find anything.

Glad you agree.

 

NICE work on the polished rings, very impressive.

 

Okay. Not had a lot of time to do much work on this case. But I will share what little I have done so far.

Knowing that I needed more lighting inside the case but not wanting those hard to place cathode tubes I came across this handy little 120mm dual cathode fan from Logisys .




Since the clear fan didn't fit the scheme of the case so far I simply simply transplanted the dual cathodes to my 120mm aluminum framed Evercool fan mounted in the door already.



Side.



Interior.



And night shots.

See? Nothing spectacular but I must say it throws light evenly throughout the interior of the case.

I've also started work on this phase of the case...



The cladding of the case doors.



To that end I purchased 2 spare door panels from Performance-PCs,



Stripped the hardware off of them,



masked off the panel and jigsawed out the shape. My assistant inspects the final product.

Pardon for the lack of in progress pics.

You'll notice that I haven't cut out the logo on the panel. That's because my plans have deviated just a bit. The design now calls for more watercutting parts to be added. I'll fill you in on that a little later as time permits.

 

Damnnn,, gj job Still getting better

 

Damn nice case, and I like your assistant too