“It was still dark, but morning would arrive soon. I had been out in the city until the wee hours of the night but had finally decided to go home; the rest of the city was still asleep. Normally, I would have taken my bicycle, but being a little unsteady I had chosen to walk home instead and take the route through the city’s main park. Suddenly, there was a tremendous roar overhead, a bright light like the midday sun, followed by an almighty explosion too soon after to immediately identify from where it came. Was it a meteorite? A shockwave hit me at that very thought and made me stumble. When I got back on my feet, I saw a red glow behind the park’s trees. Half thinking it was probably a bad idea, I decided to go take a closer look. Whatever it was, it had impacted a large open field in the park. An oval crater stood out in the middle. As I walked up to it, it began to dawn on me that it couldn’t have been a meteorite: I saw twisted pieces of metal lying around. Could it have been part of an airplane? A drone of some sort? There were more bits of metal in the centre of the crater, but at the far end of the field I could see something had landed in the bushes as their branches were broken like something had smashed through them. When I went to have a look, I saw something recognisable. It was a head. A robot’s head! Larger than a human’s. It was hot to the touch, but didn’t burn me. ‘This is a bad idea,’ I thought as I tried to lift it. It was heavy, but I was able to carry it home. Over the next months, the robot’s head was on my kitchen table as I figured out what to do with it, whether it might still work, and how. The news had ascribed the explosion and crater to a crashed drone, but I knew otherwise. A bundle of wires was protruding from what was left of its spine. One by one, I tried to find out what would happen if I ran power through them. Then one day, hooking up another wire, the head’s eye grew red, and a metallic voice from its throat spoke: ‘Robot online! Commander!’” Well, that’s the story anyways. I had been toying with the idea of building myself a new computer case in the shape of a robot’s head for years and as my old mod, Nemesis, went through its many incarnations but becoming ever more tired, it was time to turn the idea into reality. While my old PC’s hardware was still sound, the case’s water cooling system was at the end of its tether: the pump managed only a trickle and produced a rattling sound I was not able to fix; there was a leak somewhere I could immediately find which meant I had to top up the system at least once a week. That couldn’t be good. The problem was that in order to do any serious work, the whole computer had to be unplugged, put on the table and taken apart, which involved unscrewing more than a hundred bolts. Time for something new then. Nemesis in its better days I decided to put in a mini-ITX motherboard to save space, not bother with water cooling this time as I was not going to do any overclocking, run only a single large hard disk in addition to two SSDs, and as functional gimmicks put a webcam in its eye, a speaker in its throat and microphones near its ears. As for the shape and look of the head, I took inspiration from the robot Hammerstein, created by Pat Mills and Simon Bisley for the ABC Warriors comic, who also featured – though unnamed – in the 1995 Judge Dredd film. I would name the robot head Hammerstein too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_Warriors As I don’t have a workshop or space for it in my fourth floor apartment, all the work would have to be done on my living room table. I don’t know how to weld either, and even if I had learned, I wouldn’t have been able to do any in the living room: much too messy and risky. So nuts and bolts it would be. The frame and skin were made from aluminium L-bars and sheets. Working on my living room table I used the motherboard, video card and hard drive sizes to determine the head’s size. The motherboard would be placed horizontally, with the hard drive next to it; the power supply would go underneath the motherboard. It would become 36 centimetres wide, 50 deep, 20 high measured from the cheekbones plus another 10 below, and have the jaw stick out 25 centimetres lower. I took measurements from images downloaded from the internet to scale up the head’s details. The motherboard, graphics card, SSDs and hard disk In order to be able to access the hardware inside, I decided to make the upper back of the skull open like the hood of a car; it would be closed using a lock I had lying around. The first thing I built was the circumference of the head at the height of its cheekbones using L-bars. I cut out triangles so I could bend the bars into the right shape. Next came the frame of the eye sockets and eyebrows, both because that would be the hardest to shape and because that would determine the right look. Next, I made the head’s ‘hood’, followed by the frame holding the power supply. In order to get the size right, I next made the front of its upper jaw and temporarily attached it with tape. I bent a metal strip as a temporary nose so it would look right while working on it. The next thing I made was the frame of the lower jaw; for the ‘pistons’ operating it I used two things designed to hold open windows (I don’t know the names for them). I had a piece of luck when I found an old PC case in the trash as I could use its motherboard tray, cut down to size, to hold the motherboard and hard disk bracket. With the frame coming along nicely, though slowly, Hammerstein was beginning to look like a robot. I used a bit of PVC sewage pipe for the upper vertebra that would connect the spine to the skull. The rest of the spine was made from slightly larger PVC pipe connectors and I attached L-shaped brackets to the rear of the vertebrae for looks. A piece of wide vacuum cleaner hose would later be attached to the upper vertebra and fed through the others. This would hold all the cables used to connect Hammerstein: power, video, sound, USB, etc. I put a bracket to hold the slot-load slim-line DVD drive in the top of the ‘hood’. When I had made the hinges to attach the lower jaw and finally made the frame for the upper jaw, it was time to start covering the frame in aluminium skin. For most of the skin, 2-millimetre-thick aluminium sheeting was used, but for some parts that had to be bent in complicated ways I used 1-millimetre sheets. For cooling, I made holes for two 8 centimetre extra silent intake fans near the temples, and a hole for the power supply’s fan at the base of the skull. Just in case I ever needed them, I made holes for the motherboard’s extra USB connectors at the back; two USB 2.0 in the hood, and two USB 3.0 at the lower back of the skull behind the power supply. I also made holes for two toggle switches with protection caps that would operate the main power and the lights. For an extra bit of character, I made triangular holes in the temples and cut up an old Radeon video card to put behind them. For the microphones and the computer’s power switch, I drilled holes in the PCB. One of the last parts to go was the nose. Most of the skin was easy enough to make and shape, but the forehead and eye sockets were hard because of the curves involved. After some trial and error and even the use of a hammer and a large chisel, however, I finally managed to get that on as well. After the skin was done, there was a full day of filing off all the sharp edges. Then I filled a few holes that I wasn’t quite satisfied with with putty, before sanding the whole thing for painting. I chose matt coal grey for colour and a good friend offered me the use of his storage space for spray painting – thanks Cedric! With all the painting done, it was finally time to put in all the hardware and wire everything. I used extension cables to rout all the rear panel and video card connectors through the spine. A red 10-centimetre cold cathode covered by a bent piece of red plexiglass would become Hammerstein’s left eye, and two red cold cathode fan grills attached on the inside of the cooling fans provided the rest of the lighting. The rest of the computer’s hardware I have listed below. Just a single short circuit delayed the start-up, but luckily I found the culprit (mixed up lighting switch connectors) in the first attempt. The very last thing to do before Hammerstein could be used was to find some way of putting it in my office. I have to thank another good friend for coming up with the solution: hanging it from the wall using chains – thanks Marko! A fresh install of Windows 10 and then… Robot Online! Hardware: Intel Core i5-4440 3,1 GHz processor MSI Z971AC motherboard G.Skill 16 GB DDR3-2400 Kit Club 3D Radeon R9 270 royalQueen graphics card 2x Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB SSD Toshiba MD Series 6TB hard disk SilverStone SOD02 DVD burner Lexar JumpDrive S45 128GB Be Quiet! Pure Power CM L8 630W power supply LogiLink UA0053 Audio Aapter 5.1 Wonky Monkey Mini Rumble Speaker WM SP-BT50 Creative Live! Cam Sync HD VF0770 2x Be Quiet! Shadow Wings SW1 80 mm low-speed case fans
Just goes to show how far one can get with imagination and determination. A person doesn't need CNC machines, lathes and a lot of expensive tools to make a scratch build computer. You are an inspiration to lurkers like myself who want to get started. Thank you for posting your project
Wonderful... An old 2000AD fan here and I'm just reading nemesis the warlock again... Was thinking of doing something similar with Mongrol or RoJaws but only got as far as designing a new tattoo... Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
