Scratch Build – In Progress Project: Hush!

Looks good !

 

Small update: Testing of wood oils

This is testing of 0.4mm thick walnut veneer with pressure-sensitive adhesive backing sheet. Small test piece applied to a small red painted tool box here, 4 coats of Danish oil (which is a combination of Tung or Boiled Linseed oil and polyurethane varnish) applied here, light sanding after 3rd coat. It brings a deep 3D quality/depth to the walnut veneer and differential reglection of light at different angles, darkens and brings out the grain pattern and gives a slight yellow tinge (I suspect this Danish oil formulation has boiled linseed oil in it). You need to play the 10 second video below to see this properly:

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YouCut_20220611_143450686 by Tom ., on Flickr

Click video above to see the depth the oil gives

This is testing of the walnut veneer with pure tung oil - this is only 1 coat (first coat mixed with white spirits to reduce viscosity and aid saturation into the grain, applied heavily for 30 minutes to saturate then wiped off - here left relatively dry in parts after 1st coat. It gives a more brown stain. There's just the hint of depth added to the walnut so far, but will no doubt improve with more coats.

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Getting more photos in the sun was cut short by a swarm of bees swarming around a nearby tree! More to come later

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Time to make the really fiddly bits of veneer - to cover the sides of the resin-covered manifolds/boxes that all the 48 copper water pipes connect into.

This is cut a little oversized in length and width atm to trim down after. The little drill bit pictured there is a paper drill bit - essentially a sharpened tube drill made for specific paper drills...

It's a little oversized at 9mm diameter to allow for resin meniscus that formed around each 6mm diameter copper tube when casting the resin manifolds

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Sadly the paper drill bit has a funny tapered end for the specific paper drill (basically a proprietary bench drill), and the coloured collar in the middle was larger than the drill chucks of the bench and hand power drills I have, so I dremelled off the tapered part and ground down the coloured metal middle part with a micrometer to check it was parallel and would drill accurately.

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I used low tack adhesive plastic sheeting to avoid marking the veneer. It's attached to a neoprene sheet in the above photo (to avoid mangling the paper drill bit), though I switched to using a piece of pine wood as a drill bed instead as drilling needed downward pressure and the neoprene didn't help here.

I stacked two pieces of veneer to drill both at the same time and save a bit of time, with pins to prevent the veneer moving about.

48 holes drilled for the copper pipes. This will then need to be cut into thin strips to thread between the rows of pipes, aligned and stuck down and stained with tung oil with a small paintbrush. That'll be fun.

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I got a few pits in the mail from AliExpress - some little 1/4" BSP plugs to aid in spray lacquering the copper ports, and 1m of 1/4" ID cream Tygon A60F norprene tubing to use for the drain port as a valved tube tucked away, with a little baby ball valve on one end - should make draining the loop easier and less messy. I quite like the cream colour - should go well with the walnut I think for a slightly retro hifi look.

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2nd coat of Tung oil on the test pieces - again most tung oil wiped off after saturating for 30 minutes - more coats needed.


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Thanks for reading.

 

Time to slice up the veneer box sides for the side of the resin manifold the pipes pass though so it'll pass through the array of 48 pipes.

First few slits cut here were by cutting repeatedly along the cutting line to cut through, and aren't perfect - I switched after this photo to cutting by using the scalpel blade as a sort of pivoting guillotine and that allowed cutting in one strike and the rest are very clean.

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Next up horizontal cuts to seperate the veneer into 2 halves, to pass from above and below the grid of copper pipes.

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Shows better here:

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And here. All the bits cut out are arranged on the white a4 sheet to position with a pair of tweezers when the two halves have been positioned. Looking forward to that. Adhesive plastic sheet still on the two veneer halves at the bottom (so cutting guide-lines still visible)

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Thanks for reading.

 

Bloody hell I am so slow. I've only just realised you post here

 

Hello! You've seen the build log elsewhere?

 

Yeah dude. OCUK.

 

SOMEONE needs to post here. It hurts how fast the projects have died out this year.

 

Good stuff - I used to post the build log on xtremesystems and spcr when it was started - both forums seem to be dead...

 

Bit of progress - lots of small diamond filing of the resin manifolds (bit boring, no pics), and some sanding and polishing of the g1/4 bsp copper ports.

The case is upside down here - this is the drain port with an incompletely polished 1/4" right angle barbed connector with the 1m of 1/4" ID norprene drain pipe with a largely unsanded little 1/4" ball valve on the end. The norprene will be trimmed to around 35cm or so and the ball valve tucked away when finished.

Videos:

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Photos:

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If any of the admins for this forum had access to the homepage / front of Bit-tech.net, some news from the forum posted on the "welcome page" might get more interested ppl arriving here again. Then again its summer everybody normal living in a cold climate is now outside doing something else.

Might also be a good idea reviving mod of the month even without prizes.

 

Beautiful, but polishing standard household fittings is going to be nothing but suffering.
-Then again, with all you've buffed down at this point, you already are suffering.

 

Yeah the little 1/4" right angle barb is cast bronze - lots of faff to polish it up. I have another tiny 1/4" right angle barb which is actually machined bronze, which is nice considering they were about £1 delivered! It's g1/8" thread though so needs a g1/4 to g1/8 bsp adapter if I go that route.

Haha, yes a little barb to polish isn't much at this point.

 

Question to you guys - how does a vertical GPU mount with riser cable work in terms of PCI slots? Are they dual slot (and the massive say 3.5 slot air-cooled cards have a really thick aircooler, but still use 2 actual PCI slots? Considering whether to have a vertical GPU card mount, as would need to cut the 2 PCI slots from the walnut veneer for the IO wall, but not sure whether a 2 PCI slot hole will be future proof... Hope that makes sense...

Can anyone advise?

 

I could be wrong but I don’t think there are any cards that actually connect to multiple PCIE ports. A GPU can’t even take full advantage of a single PCIE port’s performance (I believe only storage/memory applications can max one out). GPUs are ‘multiple slots’ by virtue of their air coolers, which can make the card extend over other PCIE slots, rendering the slots unusable. You might want to check your motherboard manual to see which PCIE slot it recommends you plug the GPU into before selecting which one to cut out of the veneer. Some slots have more lanes than others, but it’s usually the first one that’s the one you want to use.

 

Sorry, was having a brain-fart - I meant to say pci backplate slots, where they screw into the back of the pc case. From having a look at different high end GPUs it seems some are 2 pci slots and some are 3 (those with 3 have more ventilation holes in the third metal PCI slot from the looks of things, the ports are only in the first pci slot). That's a bit annoying in terms of designing a vertical GPU bracket

 

I can provide only a theoretical answer. I have a vertical GPU design for my case prepared in CAD, but did not built it, yet.
You can buy the riser cable separately, without the pcie-bracket structure. If you go with full custom Pc case design, you design your pcie-slots and mounting structure accordingly with 2 or 3 pcie slots. If you build in a off the shelf case, there is some dremel work to be done

 

The issue I have is that if I want to go vertical gpu bracket I'll need to design cuts into a wooden-veneered wall (the IO and pci bracket wall) so will need to cut the veneer that'll clad the wall, and needing to make it 2 plus maybe 3 pci slot bracket design means either having 2 slots and a 3 pci bracket card overhanging and looking ugly, or a 3 pci slot design and having an unused pci bracket slot to cover, which again doesn't look as clean.

 

Baby update. Going to do some needless modding to mount the laptop optical drive, so got what seems the best laptop slot-loading optical drive - a fast BD burner, the panasonic UJ265, since the mounting will be drive-specific so figured best to get a BD burner. Nice to see the drive has the standard push-to-make surface mounted switch seen on the bottom left at the front there (the dark circle with the orange rim with 4 solder points at the corners of a surrounding square - should be able to cold solder to these okay with thermally conductive adhesive solder paint to attach up a remote laptop drive button on the front of the case with a bulgin anti-vandal type button to operate the drive.

Panasonic UJ265:

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Laptop drive lid taken off. 4 baby 1.6mm countersunk bolts holding the lid on. Below, 1.25mm drill bits x 2, countersunk 1.25mm centre drill bit, baby 1-6mm diameter tap-wrench with M1.6mm tap in place. Plan is to cut the top to show the drive innards, with a sheet of clear cast plexi, attached with longer m1.6 countersunk bolts I have to account for the plexi thickness.

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Lasers and clear plexi and lots of polished copper... What could go wrong?

 

I never thought I'd see an optical mod again.