Welcome to my latest little project, Ryouki. The name is Japanese and roughly means "wingman". I went with another Japanese reference to go along with Kaiten, which is undergoing some redesign, and I felt like a little break. Basically my vision was for a smaller machine that had the following qualities- Relatively Small Redundant storage array for storage and backup HTPC Functions Look good doing it! In a nutshell I wanted to offload any duties of server and media PC from my gaming PC, and serve as a pivot for home theater use. The platform I chose is the Lian Li V300 series. It is small and lightweight, and will look great as part of my home theater. The only real problem is that it can only hold 2 drives stock, up to 3 more with a SATA rack in one of the side facing 5.25 bays. The solution I decided on was this, a powder coated aluminum drive cage from Mountain Mods I admired my new case for about 3 minutes before firing up the ol' dremel. That has to be a new record for me 8) The drive cages were removed without much fuss, drilling out 8 rivets and cutting two support brackets going to the stock hard drive cage. Measure 6 times, cut once After cutting and filing, the drive rack slipped in nicely. With this I should be able to fit twin 3in2 SATA racks for 6 drives, 2 more in the back, and a DVD drive. My dremel got so hot cutting the thick aluminum I rigged up some cooling between cuts. Problem #1 was that the drive rack would not fit with the 80mm fans in place. Clearances will be tight from now on. A little love from my files and the stock drive rack looks like it came that way. I still wanted some front 80mms up front, so my first step was to square out the holes to allow the fans to pass through the mount. I broke out my coping saw and made some alumunum bars out of the leftover metal from cutting the top. Measuring, filing, and holes later I had some new fan brackets to hold the fans. I drilled a small hole for all the front panel wiring to fit through, this should conceal some of the wiring mess later. I am sure I will grommet this and make up a little cover later on. With the mods I basically must discard the original sides. I find this a shame as they are typical Lian Li quality. A new unit was made from 2mm acrylic using the original 6 mounting screws. I drew on it a bit just playing around That is as far as I got over the weekend. Aside the new drive rack I am really just modding on the fly, we well see where it goes together! -Breach
hehe if your going to run 5 HDDs in there, it'll get warm the 300 isnt know for good hard drive cooling
Actually Ill be running 6 when it is full. The racks will have their own active cooling so I don't think there will be any problems. I got some new toys yesterday Aluminum fans from Performance PCs. These feature on board speed controllers and LED lighting that always stays the same level of light regardless of how fast the fan is going. Drawback is all those damned wires :x It appears that when these were sleeved the single blue wire was excluded because I could see where it was cut on the other 3pin tail...Ill correct all this in due time. Had to get a blue ring Bulgin switch As well as UV Blue case feet from MountainMods. I started by painting the IO covers, the hard drive cover, and the fan mount Duplicolor Blue Metalflake. Oddly this paint looks just like it's Metalcast line without the hassle of two coats. Didn't seem like a difficult decision to use this instead. Fans mounted. There is a scratch already in the paint, looks like I will be re coating before final assembly. I had to drill out the holes in the fans slightly to allow the standard self tapping screws to go in far enough. Removing the stock feet. Not too bad looking by an means, Im sure they'll show up somewhere else. Using a 1/2in countersink and a small drill bit... I get these using the existing mounting hardware. I had to make small notches on the back feet to clear those pesky rivets. Badda bing 8) I still need to find some thin pads. I haven't decided if I want to light these up quite yet, but I am thinking I will when I have more time. I also enlarged the stock hole with a Rotozip blade and dremel to fit the Bulgin switch. More to come -Breach
It similar to a normal spiral drywall or general purpose cutting bit for Dremels. Rotozip is a brand of tool, but you can use the bits in dremels too.
Update 2/8 I found some time to get a bit more done, so here it goes- I start by taking apart an Aerogate I fan controller. Using the clear face I marked out a template. I had to be careful here as the fan controller had to clear the back of the case so it could slide in unimpeded. I backpainted the clear face with the Dulpicolor Blue Metalflake and mounted it. I also mounted a small switch to eventually control the CCLFs I will mount later. The Aerogate has 3 color settings for Red Green and Blue. Unfortunatly I must have broken mine modding because it will only be Red now :evil: Another was ordered... I wanted the cabling for the fans to be very stealth and compact. I started out with a standard CAT 5E network cable and used two of the pairs and wired up standard 3pin sockets. The other 2 pairs will go unused. The next victim to get some nip tuck treatment was the fans themselves by shortening the wires. The built in fan controllers will be bundled in during final assembly. You can see the other end of the network cable up top. First I sleeved the CAT cable. Then removin the ends of the 3pin plugs I slid it through a peice of 5mm acrylic tubing I fabbed to act as a wireing gutter. Mocked into place it is exactly what I was hoping for with a smooth channel instead of a rats nest of fan wiring. I know, my photo skills need some work You can see where the cat cable ends up. I engineered the length to be fairly exact to the fan controller. The wire should be largely hidden in the end. I applied some carbon fiber film to the front strip. It just isnt a mod with some Bill Owen on your case More to come- Breach
Well, how about an update? I begin with some exiting LEDs! I decided that I wanted to light those nifty blue feet. I made two strings of 2 LEDs in series. And yes I mod on my desk It will be headed for the trash heap when I move in a few months anyway. Trying to do this in an apartment has been a challenge to say the least...but modding spirit knows no bounds. One of the LED rails in place. Both lines terminate near the fan controller. The controller is being made into the master of the universe as far as power distribution. You can see the switch that is wired directly to the 12v line on the controller's PCB to feed the CCFL inverters. I have since made a revision so there are just two black wires that feed the whole system to cut down on wiring clutter. The intention is to power the lights on one of the 3pin ports. One nice side effect is this basically puts a dimmer switch on the feet. Mood mod? Everything in place. It does look a little messy, but this will all be covered by the mobo tray. I dreaded remaking this because I had already done it twice. Originally I tried UV LEDs as the feet are UV Blue, but this turned out to be far to purple and looked horrible. So I remade them with bright blue LEDs. Naturally I broke a connection installing that, so just for kicks I remade part of it again :roll: It came time to get it together! My pace went into complete overdrive to get it ready to take to the February gLan. My Kaiten project was suppose to be my Lan buddy, but decided to make this my temporary gaming box. You can see how tight everything is inside. In my haste nothing was really done about the excess wires from the PSU among others. I had to notch the drive cage to fit an 8800GTS. I did not have my SATA rack yet so I mounted a stock V1000 cage inside. Since clearances were so tight there wasnt a way to mount the CD ROM. You'll notice I attacked the top of the cage with some carbon fiber film, held in place by aluminum bolts. I may swap these for black cap screws in the end. I made new sides out of 2mm acrylic sheeting. There was no time to finish them. Also in my haste I cracked the left blue/green CCFL so a blue tube was put in its place. Ive decided that I want to run all blue, so new tubes are on the way. You will also notice that the fans are not lit. As it turns out the fans are more aqua than blue and it didn't look that good. Plus it seems one of the fans suffered some kind of power surge because it began running visibly slower at maximum voltage than the other, and had an off aqua color. So in the end they looked different than each other. As not to disgrace myself and the Mod Nation I disconnected the LEDs. On these the line is actually separate, so the fans kept running. Still reading? Ive gotten back on the path of really finishing this mod instead of basically crapping it together at the last moment. until Kaiten is off the ground it will not be truly finished, but close. The 8800GTS is just in the way so nothing can be installed in that side of the rack. I got the SATA rack and am now modding it, so I should be back with more soon! Breach
I've always liked compact. And this looks like it'll be compact with style. Since I want to build a space-conscious network for my boat (oh God, not aNOTHer project!), I'm taking notes...
Alright, we're back in the saddle! My Eiserne project has been keeping me busy latley, but I still found time to work on Ryouki more. I've decided that I am sick of seeing my pile of half done projects :roll: Initially I put it together as a gaming machine for a LAN party. Since then I got some extra parts and was able to move that system to another case leaving me free to finish Ryouki as I had intended to. I had decided that the rack would pop more in some of that fabulous metallic blue and gloss clear coat. I/O covers painted to match. This is the RAID 5 4 port SATA controller card on top and the TV capture card below. I was impressed with the FastTrack RAID controller from Promise, it is very small and fairly inexpensive for what it can do. I plan to run a full RAID 5 with 3 Seagate 250gb drives, at least to start with. You never know how much por-...movies you will need to store down the road I found that the original fans were more of an aqua color and not a true blue like the feet and the Bulgin power switch. I thought one of them was also damaged as well (although I think I found what was wrong). Bottom line is I wanted true blue, so I replaced the fans with these chrome/blue guys from Performance-PCs.com. The bracket was also repainted and clear coated, and the wiring cleaned up. Even the 3pin connectors got some metal flake lovin. I added some of the very realistic carbon film to the front. I added more of the carbon film to the side of the drive cage. Im trying to think of some other ways to jazz up this area, it still looks a little bland to me. You can see that things will be getting pretty cramped inside soon :shock:
I also got my new SATA rack I decided that nasty beige just would not stand, so I took apart the latches and gave them some Dupicolor treatment and some clear coat. Much better
that's sexy. i really like that case to begin with, and you have definitely improved upon it. however, i liked the powdercoated black better than the carbon-fiber film. also, you should hold your camera with two hands. most of your pics look good, but the ones where i can see your other hand are all blurry.
Paint the Stock drive cage with the blue paint. That's sexy ohh and maybe the mobo tray in a black or chrome black or even just the blue. I've got one of those next to me. Unfortunately it turned out pretty bad. It'll get re-worked later this summer.
