Project: Lament II - Hell's Illusion... FINISHED

Soooo cool, nice job! love it

 

I bought a small chop saw from Harbor Freight for $23.99, for cutting small stuff like Alum-angle it works better than a Dremel or nibbler... the only downside is cutting too fast causes the saw blade to bind up, but after finding the sweet spot - speed wise - it cuts Alum-angle fairly accurately.

http://www.casemodgod.com/Illusion229m.jpg

The pieces of Alum-angle are being cut to make everything match up, they are going to be attached to some acrylic cubes I had lying around - after I JB everything together I plan to attach them to the bottom of the PC.



So... below shows the JB-Kwik, paper plate, some craft sticks and the numbered pieces of acrylic and Alum-angle ready to fly.



Since JB-Kwik doesn't work so great on completely smooth surfaces I decided to give the corners a little extra strength by drilling a couple of shallow holes in each side for it to flow into on top of filing them rough. The overflow JB was scraped off and all the pieces were taped together, below shows them finished.



I cut four small squares of Alum-angle, drilled holes into them and filed them rough, they were then carefully JB-Kwik'd into the corners. I also drilled some holes into the top of each acrylic cube to give the JB somewhere to flow and hopefully strengthen the connection.



The feet stuck on really well so I cut four half inch pieces from a length of 3/4x3/4" Alum-angle to hide the gaps at the bottom and JB-Kwik'd them into place. The whole thing was masked and then painted, results below.



Here is the other side... just a little more work to do and it will finally be done, detail work and fixing the things that bother me.



One of the things bothering me is the fact that the plug for the internal USB connection from the Matrix Orbital stuck out too far to be usable and as a result I almost cheesed out and connected it externally... but I am a modder and having wires sticking out all over the place couldn't possibly be the best option. I came to my senses, figured out a better way and cut out the side of the CD bracket to accommodate the M.O. internal USB plug (below, circled in red), this will also free up an external USB port which is important since there are only two.



Since the design for the outer acrylic housing was changed to slide off in one slick piece I had to wire up a new power button which will now be hidden beneath the mod... which is better anyway.



I will work on it more tomorrow and hopefully have everything ready to fire it up again - which means re-installing Windows since I intentionally didn't activate it on the last install... my theory is that it's better to iron everything out first and make sure it all works thereby avoiding the inevitable 'too many install' phone call to a barely understandable MS tech in India.

STAY TUNED, I HAVE SUCH SIGHTS TO SHOW YOU.

 

I roughly assembled all the parts of the mod (except for the outer acrylic casing), plugged the Matrix orbital into the internal mother board USB pin-out, plugged the illusion section LED's into the back of the Matrix Orbital and attached the new power button onto the bottom side of the mod. The following picture shows the mod up and running, time to put the cover on and see what happens.



Next up is a shot of the "Hell's Illusion" vinyl decal, you can make out the red LED's reflecting off the carbon fiber up top in the letter "L"... it's not quite as cool an effect as I had hoped, but it is acceptable. I will probably end up making the thin space at the bottom between the acrylic and the mod reflective to direct the lights back up onto the carbon fiber.



And here is the completed mod fired up and purring away on my desk. I ordered some white Lazer LED's that I want to try out instead of the red ones that are currently wired to the remote sensor... and I still want to throw a Matrix Orbital temp probe or two in there, but other than that it is finally (and thankfully) finished.



Semi-final thoughts... For something so simple looking this mod was at times a pain in the ass, fabricating the small case was trial and error and it went through several design revisions before I got it right. It took over a year in my spare time to complete the build, but it's small and impressive, the parts are all easy to access and it is fully upgradeable... so it's all good. In my excitement over wrapping up this project I almost forgot that I was also writing a fictional counterpart to the mod, I will finish the last chapter and post more pictures soon.


STAY TUNED, I HAVE SUCH SIGHTS TO SHOW YOU.

 

congratulations Troy

This a Fantastic MOD i have Quite Literally followed this from the very beggining on CaseModGod and im glad to see that you have finally finished it

Whats next?

 

You have brought the most extreme way of modding/builds(scratch mod) to a very high level .
Extremely nice workmanship.

By the way i cant belive u haven't got more coments than this with such a outstanding buildt

 

yakyb,
Sorry for the late reply, I've been very busy lately... but it's good to hear from you, thanks for the kind words. As for whats next - something simpler, bigger and drumroll please... HellRaiser themed, it's already 90% planned out and will be the last in the series.

TapperSwe,
Thanks alot man, I'm following your Kickass King Khufu build. I don't know why there aren't more comments either, maybe I need to post some detail pictures and a size comparison of it... because it really is a cool little computer. BTW, in your thread you showed off some of your pre-mod metal work and I thought you would like this (I made it back in 1986)...

 

Yeah u might would have to post some more pics because i think it shold have got more attension than this, maybe some pics comparing the size with a midtower or other pc ,because like u said the size of it is really small.

God dammit, that Freddy Kruger glove brings me back to the 80s when i was a kidd and saw the Terror on elm street for the first time, really hardcore . Are the blades sharp?

 

No, it is just a prop and they are aluminum, but it's sturdy and can be worn... if I ever get around to building another one though the blades on it will be razor sharp.

 

I got araound to check your website, and i have seen the Cenobite PC before but only one picture and not the entire worklog ,man that work is so amazing ,how do you got the time to do all this fantastic modds? and where did you pic up all those skills ,born with them or hard practice he,he.

 

TapperSwe,
Each mod takes about a year to do so it's not really a speedy process, the skill part is 90% anality and only 10% talent... time spent obsessing is why it takes so long.

Size comparison time... the mod is an 8 1/4" cube, a dollar bill and ruler are sitting on top with an empty (tasty) 12 oz. bottled beer beside it (which the mod stands just a hair shorter than) shown below. I was careful to keep the goings on of the side panels all relative in size and as you look over the following pictures you can see that the illusion panel is the same size edge to edge as the LCD/M.O. panel and Hell's Illusion decal panel, it's all in the details.



The illusion section of the mod looks kind of creepy with the single LED shining up on the box and although the screen looks a bit washed out you can see the awesome degree of viewing angle on the 6" LCD...



Due to the seemingly simplistic nature of this mod the details are easy to overlook, like the fact that the side walls of the illusion are illustrated using a repeating pattern of Escher angels and devils or that the edges of the side pattern and the half HellRaiser box line up so tightly with the mirror... the reflection of multiple boxes onto the red mirror chrome within the illusion section is also pretty neat and is also shown in the picture below.



The following picture serves to further express the evil... the HellRaiser cube is freaking floating in mid-air inside the case, the whole trick looks very convincing in person. Normally the side window of a mod is for showing off the hardware inside the case, floating boxes are cool but to be able to see the computer guts too... wicked cool.



I haven't had enough time to mess with the Matrix Orbital to make more than the one LED in the illusion section light up, but I will... in the meantime I turned the single LED off and used the remote control to turn on the internal red LED's. The following picture shows what it looks like with the red lazer LED's on in ambient lighting with full flash, it's semi-transparent and kind of funky...



The following picture was taken with the lights out and camera flash muffled, after pushing the wireless remote button the secret of the illusion section is completely exposed showing both parts and cables lit up behind the half cube. I had planned on changing the internal lighting over to white, but red is where it's at... the red LED lighting blends into the red mirror chrome and makes the internal PC parts look almost surreal.



Next up is a shot of the front of the case showing the 6" LCD and Matrix Orbital, I still have to dial down the brightness for both but it looks far better in person than the following picture makes it out to, it's kind of hard to photograph anyway.



The next picture shows the carbon fiber (which is the back side of the mother board tray) beneath the vinyl "Hell's Illusion" decal and back painted acrylic panel in full light with the camera flash on...



And with the flash off, the power LED is shown glowing red but there's also an HDD activity and suspend LED, but they aren't lit up in the following picture...



The whole case is made out of Alum-angle and acrylic and it's completely held together with JB-Kwik, the design is such that the theme could easily be changed... so if I tire of HellRaiser I can always make another illusion section and outer casing for it. I plan to take some video of how the mod opens up and disassembles to better illustrate the ease of access to the internal workings soon.

STAY TUNED, I HAVE SUCH SIGHTS TO SHOW YOU.

 

I bought a Gyration optical air mouse and wireless keyboard combo for the mod when I first started the build to eliminate some of the end cable clutter, but there's a snag... the USB RF receiver is too fat to fit in the USB port because both of the MB USB's sit right and tight below the VGA plug.

Another bummer is that the mouse has to charge for eight hours before using it, that's plenty of time to dig through my parts boxes to find an internal USB header, solder together a cable and hook it up to the one remaining internal USB MB pinout... but I have to test it first. I hope it works well because the reciever is small enough to easily be hidden beneath the mod but with a 2.4 GHz operating range I am not going to hold my breath... and I'm damn sure not going to solder a cable (yet).

STAY TUNED, I HAVE SUCH SIGHTS TO SHOW YOU.

 

uber mod, I like how you managed to pack so much in there and, as far as I know your the only person to add an ilusionary floating box inside there pc

 

That was a good picture uppdate, it showed more the real size of the case and had more details of the case then previous pics , looking good .

 

That is uberklass, a most impressive mod!
Jaz_knos

 

Glad to see this finished Troy ... So very cool and so very much work ... all was worth it now, I bet

DB

 

Thanks Kipman725, TapperSwe, JazX101 and D B.

I finally got around to installing the airmouse and wireless keyboard and they both work great with the receiver hidden under the mod, time to make an internal USB cable.