Made with SketchUp and hosted by ImageShack. The frame would be made of 1/2" wide, 1/8" thick aluminum angle, all riveted together. The motherboard tray would be made out of 1mm thick steel. I'm still trying to fathom how I might fabricate it without the proper tools. I'll probably have to rig something up myself...It's not a solid peice, there are many folds and overlapping sections. I might build this over the summer...right now it's just a concept. Oh, and the big fan is a 120mm, the small ones are 60mm. Both cutouts are accurate to Panaflo's specifications. I don't need the 60mm fans, but I always wanted fans near the cards to pull cool air across them. For the source air, this is going to be an "upside down" Lian-Li whatevermodel type case, I'd probably have somewhere near the slots for getting in fresh air right across from the 60mm fans...that idea's still in my head.
Expanded a lot...I added the PSU mounts and the hard drive cages. The drives will be sandwiched among metal supports either flush riveted or epoxied on. Then I'll have some sort of hinge or latch to hold the drive in place vertically. It might be as little as a screw with a peice of metal or a bar with a hinge that flips down and latches onto the other side.
looks good but a few suggestions/notes. First off, those angle bracks wont hold the drives - they're too high/low to meet the holes. second, it would work nicely if you put an 80mm fan at the front of the hdd area, and just made it so that that air flowed thru to the psu, keeping it from going anywhere else. Thermal zones ya hear? Next, there is a hell of a lot of space up front that's free. Either that's going to opticals, or somebody is looking to play with a little water . By the way, could you msn/aim me the sketch?
As I said, the hard drive enclosure is designed to be screwless. The drives are held in place be the squares of aluminum. They're actually pretty thin and I didn't bother extruding them out so they're hard to see. And yes, I'll be placing some fans there, that's the whole point of the design. As far as the open space, yes, it's quite huge, I'll be shifting things here and there...I think right now it's about 2-3 inches longer than a standard PC. And, why do you want the sketch?
simply to give myself an advanced look at your design dynamics, and modify it a bit to work on a vision of mine . that and your mobo tray rocks
The mobo tray is a heavily modified version of the one on the sticky thread around here. I cleaned it up a lot and made the panels actually have real thickness. It's all 1mm thick to perfectly match that standard of sheet metal. What's your AIM name?
Unless the smaller fans are at least 80mm they wont do mutch besides adding noise to the case. So I sugest you get rid of em and maybe put in one of the swiftech 5 /14inch blowers meant for 5 1/4inch bay as those are really quiet around 20db or so and move way more air than a high speed 60mm fans can. My .02cent. ---Ta
Yeah I was thinking about that. At the time I figured I'd use some quiet 60mm Panaflos. They'll move around 12-15 CFM a peice, which isn't a lot, but it's more than enough to remove stagnant air. I didn't bother looking up any of those crossflow blowers, I just stuck those in there. I can actually fit 70mm fans in there, 80s are cutting it close. If I raise the case another 1/4" I could get 80s in there. I'll have to look up the specs on various blowers and see how they'd stack up to two 70mm or 80mm fans. Also all fans would be properly mounted with silicone grommets. By properly I mean by expanding the mounting hole and fitting the grommet into the whole like they're made for, not just sticking a grommet between the fan and the case, that does litte...the vibrations still transfer from the fan to the screw to the case. Albeit maybe a LITTLE less but...anyways, enough ranting. I'm gonna work on this some more today and see what I can come up with.
Another update. I've replaced the rear fans with 80mm Panaflos, that's the cutout for them anyway. It's actually the exhaust cutout, I need to make it the intake cutout, because the fans will have to be mounted on the outside to make room for the screws for the slots. I'll use 15mm slim fans, probably Panaflos. I'll stick a grille on each side of course. Oh, ignore the drives and the fan figure in the front, those were just some placement/size tests. Looks like I can fit two 80mm fans in the front, the big 120 and three drives. Oh and...I looked into those tangential blowers. For the 5.25" bay ones, the manufacturers should be sued for false advertising. There is no way they can move 100 CFM at 20 dBA. That's ********. I looked up real blowers made by real cooling companies (Papst, et al) and none of them had that noise to airflow ratio. Infact, they were usually worse than axial fans. Which is what I thought from the start. These are also cheaper and easier to mount.
