Project: Far Cry, Completed (sort of) 12th July

Ok first off I will show my wonderful paint drawing of loop for the water feature and explain a little.



The light blue lines obviously represent the water.

The curved line under the top is roughly the shape of the pond type thing at the top.

The green line goes from the lowest point at top to the front of the case to allow water to drain from the upper area.

The red lines represent the tubing. As you can see there is a tap there so I can adjust the flow to the top area. This will most likely be set and left in one position. So that it doesn’t restrict the flow to much and put pressure on the connections there is a T joint before it where the excess water can go back to the res at the bottom. There is also a on off valve there. This is so I can turn off the flow to the top. Then the water will be just pumped back to the res and the water from top will drain to the bottom. This leaves all the water in the bottom res for transporting the case. The flow splitter will allow me to take many much smaller tubes to different areas of the top section so its not just one mass of water coming up in one area. They will be spread around the little island and hopefully look as if the water was heading towards the island like the waves in the game. It wont give the exact effect like the game but it will be a lot better then a single large lot of water coming up.

Now on to the actual work I got done last night. I was going to post this last night but I fell asleep before I got a chance to.

As you can see I got the power supply and radiator mounted.



This is a shot from the other side. The wires are hidden quiet nicely I think. (sorry for the bad pic)



Shot from the bottom showing the radiator



Once from the back of the PSU.



Then I cut some holes in the mother board tray to allow power wires etc to come up through. I had marked their positions earlier when I had the mother board in for test fitting. (again sorry for the bad pic)



Last but not least more water cooling gear Thanks to Razorfoot for the pump and Sapper Wang for the NV-68 (from game planet forums in NZ). I have been lucky to get all the gear at a good price second hand so far. Only thing left to buy is some Tygon.



All for now. About to get something to eat then head out to the garage to do some more.

 

Hah sounds good. Not sure about the little fish though lol. Will have to make the water blue somehow, clear water wouldn’t go with the game.

 

what you have to do for blue water is paint the base plue then put PVA glue on top of this or anything that dries clear

 

Wooooooo I reached my goal. Everything is in and working. In fact I am typing this on the computer running in the case. I will be taking it all out again tomorrow now that I know it fits though.

Here’s what I did tonight.

Modified the motherboard tray. Unfortunately this meant moving the motherboard back a little and so I had to re-drill all the mounting holes. No big deal though. After putting everything in I found I need to change it a little but at least its better to find that out now then a couple of days before the event once its all painted.





Here are a couple of pics with everything in.

The wires don’t look to messy. Unfortunately the wonderful engineers at Asus decided it was a good idea to put a molex plug right next to the top PCI-E slot for the SLI or something. I will have to do something about that wire as it looks very ugly strung across the motherboard.



Also on the topic of wires. I don’t like how you can see some of the wires behind the hard drive rack. This wouldn’t be as noticeable it was full instead of just having two drives but I will still do something about it if I get time.



Just a back view. You can see where I need to change things slightly around the graphics card to make a little more room for the DVI plugs.



That’s all for now people. More tomorrow, I plan to work on this most nights now in an effort to get it all done in time.

Thanks for looking.

 

i really cant get my head around this image, is it some kind of optical illusion?!



(edit: haha, on further inspection i can see it now, i was looking at it as if the front shiny silver part was a sort of trapezium shaped piece of metal and the darker bits were the side of it, i couldnt figrue out what the lower bits were!)

 

I say paint the PSU

 

i'll second that!

 

Ha, I did that! Took me a minute or two to figure that picture out, now I can't see the original

Great mod and I've been following this snce last moth, I am really impressed with the detail of the Far Cry title and can't wait to see finish!

 

BTW, in my eyes the loops looks good. But I don't know a shi* about watercooling

 

Haha yeah that pic is a little freaky. I guess I didn’t notice because I knew what they were

DOH!!! Why did you have to suggest painting the PSU Now I think it’s a good idea I never actually thought of doing that as you wont see it apart from the back. I will see how I’m going for time when It comes to painting the case.

Thanks for the comments guys I really appreciate the comments. Lets me know if I’m stuffing things up or not

 

Hehe. I started to paint mine when I was fixing some new connectors on it^^

 

Damn, almost knocked down onto the second page! Haven’t updated for a few days. That’s not because I haven’t been working on it, I have been working on it lots! Just haven’t had any interesting pics to post. Thought I better do a little update now so the next one isn’t so massive.

With most of the work done on the inside part of the case it was time to start working again on the outside. First off, I fiber glassed the outside of the foam. Well I hoped to get the whole thing done but I ran a little short of resin so ill have to do the last little bit later on once I get some more.

I cut some mat roughly to the sizes I would be needing. I used 10oz woven cloth, because its what I had lying around. I would have liked to put a 2oz cloth over the top to give a cleaner finish but ill explain why I didn’t later.



Next it was time to wet down the matting. I was a little worried when I mixed up the resin. It was some old stuff I had got off a mate that works with the stuff for a living and it was just in unmarked containers so I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be 4 to 1 or 5 to 1 mix with resin and hardener. I took a guess and went with 4 to 1, it was good because it worked out about right for the amount I had left of each.

Oh yeah standard health and safety notice When working with epoxy resin It may seem ok to not wear a mask as it doesn’t let off a great stink like the polyester based resins on fillers. IT’S NOT THOUGH!!! It’s just as bad for you so wear a freekin mask! Also it’s best to wear gloves if you can as getting the epoxy on your skin isn’t the best for you either, apparently there’s some harmful crap which can be absorbed through your skin.



Well my worries of the resin not going off were soon taken away, but this wasn’t a good thing! The resin started to go off as I was working with it. This should never happen with epoxy. If you have the wrong amount of hardener it just won’t go off, unlike polyester resin which just goes off quicker depending on how much hardener/catalysts you use. I figure the resin was just a bit old or something. Unfortunately the matting lifted in a few places due to air bubble I couldn’t get out. I’m pretty sure this was due to the resin starting to go off.



Next was time to start the filling and sanding process. My favorite part… NOT!!!! Little bit of this stuff we all should know what this is



Then sand.



Then I ran out of 60g sand paper so went off to the shop before work to get some.

Skipping a few steps here because they are all the same, just more filling and sanding and this is the result.



Could probably do with a little more sanding to get rid of some of the scratches left by the 40g sandpaper but most of this will be covered in fake sand/rocks so its not a big deal.

Just for fun a few shots of why you have to wear a mask while sanding this stuff.





The piles from the case in the last pics taken out and put next to an crappy old spray can for scale.



Now imagine that in your lungs… bad… very bad!

All for now. I will be starting on the fake rocks and things soon. Look out for an update in the next few days

 

Looking good man, i cant wait to see this start to take a colour transformation

 

Very nice pictures so far. Your posts have motivated me to start my very own case. NOTE: I'VE NEVER work with Bondo, wiring, fiberglass, painted with spray cans or used a dermel before, so this should be a fun learning experiment for me!!

 

Looking good Zero_Limits, can't wait till you get some water flowing down those sides. I've never used resin and cloth before. Why did you use that instead of just bondo on top of the foam?

 

Thanks man. Yeh the multicolored look doesn’t suite it does it Thinking of doing the inside Silver with some white cathodes. Mainly because I will need silver paint for my next project so I figure seeing I have to buy a liter its best to be a colour I will have a use for.

Glad to hear my pics have done some good Good luck with your project, best way to learn is by trying it. There are lots of useful people here to help you out if you get stuck. Post some pics when you get started.

Thanks man!

There was a couple of reasons for using the fiber glass first. On its own foam is pretty strong but sort of soft and easy to dent so one of the reasons was to add a bit of strength to the foam before applying the bondo. The other and main reason is that bondo or any sort of non epoxy based filler/resin will actually eat into the foam and start melting it.

Have done a little more on the case this morning, added some rocks to the top. I will post some pics tonight after I do a little more work.

Thanks again for the comments guys!

 

Time to rescue this from the second page! It’s finally time for an update. I haven’t done a great deal of work on this in the past few days. At the moment I am up to putting the fake rocks on which could take some time. Anyway no point typing lots about it when pics work so much better.

Because I can be fairly impatient when it comes to certain jobs like waiting for glue to dry I used some of my favorite CA glue to stick down the rocks.



Obviously there are gaps which aren’t wanted here. So I went over the gaps with some more filler. I actually used a cores paint brush to apply it to give it a rough texture.



Then a quick and random run over with this. Checking a couple of times to make sure I haven’t taken to much off.



I ended up with this.



It was hard to see what it would actually look like due to the different colours of the ground down filler. So I decided to add a quick coat of what ever paint I had lying around for no reason other then to see how it would look. It will be painted over again in the future.



In future I will be shaping each rock slightly to make it fit better with the one next to it. It’s a long process but it has to be done.

I also got another rock mould so that I could do larger areas without having a heap of joins to fix up later. These ones cover much more area but are a lot flatter.

The mould



The rocks it produces.



At the moment progress is slow on things which are basically the same so I might not update this to often but I will be making progress!

Thanks for taking the time to read this or at least look at the pics

 

Do you think you will get it done in time?

 

I have spent to much time on it not to get it done in time. So I will most likley get it done or die from lack of sleep trying

I am pretty confident I can get it done in time though. Will involve a few late nights and a lot of hard work but it will be done

 

Well I got a little bit more work done on the case last night. It was a little bit which took a long time!

I needed to make some elbow type joins for the water fittings to go to the top of the case.

So I took a bit of ½ inch brass rod.



Cut it into a few little bits.



Then a few more and cleaned them up a little on the bend grinder.



I drilled most of the way down through the bottom then through the side. Then I soldered in a bit of 5/32 brass tubing.



Close up of the solder. Lots of excess, not pretty but at least I know its sealed all nicely.



This doesn’t really show much and I’m feeling a bit to lazy at the moment to explain where these go exactly. Next update they should be all finished and in place so look out for another update tomorrow if you want to see.

Thanks for reading.