Modding Project Newb Kewb, October 19

This is a scratch-built project rather than a mod, but I can't submit it as a project log because it isn't really a log, and the project is complete. You see, when I started this project, my first scratch-built case, I wasn't at all sure I'd come out at the end with a new system.

Well, I do have a new system, and I learned a lot along the way. Most of all, I learned that just about anyone can build a case from scratch. Most folks who do so will wind up on their first attempt with a case about as well-built as mine, which isn't very, but that's the the point of part of the story; the other part of the story is that in spite of its many imperfections, the case isn't actually ugly – it just doesn't show high craftsmanship. Well, I don't think it's ugly. Gaudy, maybe, but not really ugly. Besides, it's going to be a shop computer. One never knows when one might need to order something from woodworker.com in mid-project. Or maybe from NewEgg.

I was intrigued by Cheapskate's GwasGween project, and other acrylic projects, so decided my first effort would be an acrylic case. Starting with SketchUp and components provided courtesy of others (and thank you very much to everyone who has contributed to providing those components), and figuring I would go with a really inexpensive set of components for this first effort, I produced this concept drawing for Newb Kewb.




Since the minimum dimensions seemed to be 11 inches on a side or less, I decided to make a 1 ft cubed case from clear ¼ inch acrylic. I'd have a little extra room, and I could play with adding LEDs, or whatever, to gaud the case up. This wasn't necessarily to be a pretty computer; it was to be a learning experience for later, when maybe I'd decide that some LEDs, etc., would contribute to making a case beautiful. The internal case of the optical drive would be 1/8 inch fluorescent orange acrylic, and the internal case for the hard drive (not shown, as there seemed to be plenty of room for it) would be 1/8 inch fluorescent green acrylic. Might as well go for spectacularly gaudy rather than merely gaudy.

Not knowing at this point just how I was going to actually construct the case and internal enclosures, I didn't see much point in trying to do any detailed designing, I'd just start cutting and see what developed. I can't exactly say that was a mistake, looking back on it now, but I can say that a little more thought might have gone into some of the details ahead of time. For instance, I didn't take into account the thickness of the ¼ inch acrylic, so lost ½ inch of length, width, and depth for the components right there. I didn't take into account that I was going to have the mobo sit above a sheet of aluminum on standoffs, with the aluminum sitting on a middle tray of ¼ inch acrylic inside the case. That meant about another entire inch used up below the mobo that I hadn't planned for.

Anyway, seeing from other projects how apparently easy it was to bend acrylic, I thought maybe I'd cut a sheet of ¼ clear acrylic to 12 inches by 48 inches, put four right angle bends into it, and wind up with the sides of a 1 ft cube. If, that is, I could actually bend the acrylic that easily. So to test I cut off a strip and bent it.



Noting that the actual bend was a little over ¼ inch away from where I'd clamped the board, I took that factor into account on another bend.



The picture shows most of my bending technique: clamp the acrylic to a board, then heat the bend area with a heat gun until the plastic will bend. Simple, once one takes into account that the bend will occur a little more than ¼ inch above the board rather than right at the edge of the board.

I used a two-speed heat gun, with high and low settings. While I often started on high, I didn't leave it there long, changing to low for most of the heating. I heated both sides, although most of the heating was to the outside of the bend. I found that I could feel a little less resistance to bending just before the plastic was really ready to bend, then within another few seconds the plastic would bend readily.

This test bend wasn't wasted, as I would cut the result into right angle “brackets” to hold on the top, bottom, and middle support. You'll see those brackets a bit later.



Encouraged by my success at making bends in acrylic, I cut the 12 inch by 48 inch piece to make the sides and proceeded to bend it the same way as the smaller pieces. Acrylic is such a poor conductor that it isn't difficult to get a 12 inch wide piece hot enough to bend nicely, using a heat gun, again mostly on low rather than high. I used a small carpenter's level to first make sure my bending board was level, then to make sure the sheet to be bent was vertical, meanwhile also working off of pencil lines drawn on the protective paper.

Here is the setup after the first bend. Note that it is necessary to support the bent-over part of the sheet for some time after bending, at least several minutes. Also you can see here that I wasn't careful enough to get a right angle bend; it's bent a little past a right angle. This was the principal cause of dished sides later, I think.



The fourth bend almost closed the cylinder.





And here's where I made another mistake. I thought the result was close enough, so didn't sweat the fact that the alignment was off ¾ inch. Surely the stresses wouldn't be that high if I just glued the thing together by force? Well, the stresses probably weren't too bad, although they caused the junction to break about four times during subsequent operations, but they probably contributed to the dished sides. I should have fiddled some more here with the heat gun, to get the alignment better before going on.

Here are the components for the system:
mobo – ASUS M2N68-AM micro ATX AMD
cpu - AMD Athlon II X2
psu - hec HEC350TEWX ATX 12v Vers 2.2
memory – G. Skill DDR2 200 2 x 1 GB
hd - Western Digital AV-GP 500 GB
od - LiteOn
WiFi - Rosewill RNX G300EX 802.11g/b
fans - two Cooler Master R4-L2R-20CR-GP red fans
cpu cooler – Cooler Master DK9-7E52A-OL-GP

and the obligatory photo of all the goodies (even if rather far from state-of-the art, in this case)



I cut three square pieces of ¼ clear acrylic for the top, bottom, and middle support, and proceeded to attach the top and bottom using the right angle brackets. With the sides positioned over the top, I cemented four brackets to the top, two on each side, none in front or back. The bottom got only three brackets, one in back and one on each side. With the top in place I drilled holes through the walls of the case and then through the brackets. Then I tapped the holes in the brackets, and drilled out the holes in the case so that the nylon screws would turn freely there. The tapping operations went very smoothly: take about a turn on the handle, then back up about a quarter turn to feel the chip break off, and repeat until done.



With the top and bottom attached, I set up my router table with a flush-trimming bit to trim the top and bottom to fit. Since this had been my plan, I hadn't worried much about the dished sides, but I should have. I'll show you a picture later that shows how much the sides were dished, and you'll also see why the dishing is obvious to even casual observation. And I couldn't use this technique with the flush-trimming bit to make the middle support exactly the right shape – but it didn't have to be a tight fit, anyway.



While I had the router set up I trimmed a little off the top and bottom of the square cylinder; bending had left the insides of the bends sticking up while the outsides retreated (as shown in the picture below). I used a coarse file to finish evening off the top and bottom, then sanded and polished all the edges with a buffing wheel and compound for polishing acrylic.



I used a hole saw to make starter holes in the case walls, leading to the first of several fractures of the cemented connection in the back wall. Should have planned well enough to have made all the necessary cuts before bending. I did find acrylic blades for my saber saw that helped with some of the cutting. I found it difficult to smooth edges with my Dremel, as I had a tendency to dig it in at one spot or another. With care I sometimes managed to use the Dremel to smooth cuts that had wandered around a little. A woodworking rasp was generally better for the purpose, but a lot slower. I used a hand fretting saw to make some cuts, a power jig saw for others. I had a lot of trouble slowing the power jig saw down enough that the acrylic didn't melt and fuse back together right behind the blade. I had a little of that trouble with the saber saw until I found the acrylic blades. My saber saw is made by Bosch, and I believe it was Bosch acrylic blades that I found that worked so well for me.

This picture shows the walls of the case about to be drilled by the hole saw in a drill press. That's what I'd wanted to do. But I couldn't find any way to support the wall being drilled, so ended up putting the square cylinder over a 2 x 4 board clamped to my workbench, and using a hand power drill instead. If I'd made all the openings before bending, I could have used the drill press – much better for a hole saw.





I also used the hole saw to cut circles for the feet, as shown here. I made the customary four of these, planning to light them up with LEDs, of course.



I took no pictures of the making of the 1/8 inch acrylic enclosures for the optical drive and the hard drive. Basically I just cut out rectangular pieces wide enough for the lengths of the drives, and long enough to be bent into a U shape. Then I cemented ¼ inch strips of the same acrylic, orange or green, to the tips of the U-shapes to give them some width for being cemented to the bottom for the hard drive (green), and to the middle tray for the optical drive (orange). But wait... There isn't room beneath the middle support for the optical drive. The power supply is too tall or the middle support is too short. And the middle support can't be raised because there isn't any extra room between the fans. Uh oh...

Here's a picture of the case with the middle support sitting on top of the power supply, while I measured and pondered.



Nothing for it but to hang the optical drive from the top of the case, spoiling that fine view through the clear case of the mobo – although with the cable management I intended (virtually none, that is), there weren't going to be many good viewing angles, anyway.

Bending the 1/8 inch acrylic for the drive enclosures was simple enough to do crudely, but difficult to do with any precision. The enclosures wound up close enough to square that I could cement them down (or up, as the case might be), so to that extent, they worked. My bends for the optical drive enclosure were a little too far apart, and I had to add strips of acrylic to the insides in order to grip the drive better. In other words, I made it work, but I'm not really proud of it. That's on the one hand. On the other hand, when I first started thinking about building my own case, my biggest concern was how to hold the optical and hard drives. Now I know that there is nothing much to it. All sorts of ways will work. While it's tougher if you want a method that allows you to swap these drives out routinely, it's simple to just attach them to whatever with machine screws that have the proper thread. Not that I remember precisely right now. What was that, 6-32 in one case and M3 (metric) in the other? But any sort of frame that you can make a little sturdy will work just fine.

Then there were details to take care of, such as attaching the feet, making a sheet aluminum mobo tray (probably not at all necessary – I might just as well have put the mobo on the standoffs attached directly to the middle case support, saving almost half an inch of space over the power supply), Dremel-ing out the various openings in the back so that the cables, jacks, etc., could actually attach where intended.

Finally it was time for the smoke test. I was fairly confident because I'd actually done a smoke test way back, shortly after the parts arrived. I got as far as having the system suggest I load an operating system. (I'd managed to bend a pin on the CPU when installing the first time. But I figured out what was wrong, finally, straightened the pin, and got everything to work.) But now that the computer was basically built, it was refusing to start up. All it would do was kick the fans a little when turned on, then quit.

Shorting pin 14 of the main connector to ground didn't help, which was a decent indication that it was the power supply that had gone out rather than the cpu, so I bought a new power supply. That fixed the problem electronically, but the new power supply didn't seem to match the holes I'd drilled to attach the original. Now I think that if I just turned the new power supply over it would match, but it's pretty confined and not likely to move around much, so it's just sitting in the case right now. The original power supply took air in at the bottom and exhausted out the back, but the new one takes air in at the front and exhausts out the back. Not a problem, but that messy hole I cut in the bottom of the case is no longer needed.

While waiting for the new power supply I went ahead with putting in some LEDs. Never worked with the things before, so I had to do some reading up ahead of time. Seemed simple enough, so I bought a goodly selection, and wired up three loops of 4, one loop of green and two of yellow. The green LEDs went into the fluorescent green hard drive enclosure, one set of yellow went into the feet, and the other into the fluorescent orange optical drive enclosure.

Since I picked up the power supply at a local Fry's, I also took advantage of their sleeving options to get some of that split-spiral stuff. It neatened up the power supply wiring a fair amount, but there are still a whole bunch of wires running willy-nilly throughout the computer. Would need a a redesign of the system to locate switches, ports, and the like to do much better, so I probably will not attempt any further cable management. But next time I'll know what has to go where, and maybe then I can work the design to minimize the clutter.

Oh, and I had bought a cheap case from which to pirate switches. usb ports, and the like. I found locating these parts to be the toughest part of buying stuff to scratch-build a case. Probably could pick up an old computer from Goodwill, or maybe buy an old case for $5 from a computer repair place, to get these sorts of parts. Otherwise maybe one of you experts might put together a sticky that names these parts. Now I think I know that a “vandal switch” is either a computer power-up switch or a computer reset switch, depending on how it's connected to the mobo, but I didn't start off knowing that. Searching a computer supply place for “on-off switch” or “power switch” didn't do much good. Etc.

The Bit-Tech sticky on project logs says to clean up your computer before taking pictures. Sorry 'bout that, but Newb Kewb will just have to do as is. Besides, it's going to be a shop computer. Further besides, if you don't look too closely, it almost looks good anyway.









So here's the new power supply, floating in the bottom of the case. Actually the power cables pretty well pin it in. Maybe one day I'll take the bottom of the case off, turn the power supply over, and see if then it will fit the holes I drilled for the original psu. Note too that the acrylic broke off at the lower right, failing at the cemented joint simultaneously, during the cutting of the hole for the power supply. Should have made all the holes before bending the case, and maybe even before trimming the big piece for the sides to final size.

And if I'd used some sort of form to bend the case around, rather than just bending it around the edge of a board....



The next shot shows I got tired of filing and smoothing before the job was really done.





The next one shows how the front of the case bows inward, made all too obvious by the curved edge and by the projection of the optical drive.











There you have it. Proof positive that anyone can build a computer case from scratch, and maybe even have it look decent when done. And learn enough to maybe do the job nicely next time.

Okay, you guys (and gals), flame away...

Edit: a preview makes it look like I didn't handle the pictures quite right. Please bear with me until I get this thing straightened out.

 

Open square bracket "img" close square bracket - image url - open square bracket "/img" close square bracket.

Gives you




Haven't read through everything (don't have time just now, dinner's under the grill and I'm the cook for the night) but will come back and go through it all.

 

Thanks for the attempt at assistance, asura, but as you can see, I'm still having trouble. What did I leave out? Does bit-tech have some instructions for how to do this? I thought I looked through everything before attempting to post my project.

Newb Kewb's Noob

 

Okay... still haven't read it, sorry. You need to right click on the image you want to use, and select "copy image URL" or some equivalent bit of text, that'll give you a direct link to the image, rather than to the page that the image is on.

The other option (and possibly the more polite one, I'm not sure how BT's forums work visa vie image hosting) is to save all the images you want, host them yourself on something like photobucket then insert the images from there.

And see here or here for tips on using bbCode.

 

Thanks again, asura. Guess I'd never encountered BBCode before, but was reasonably sure I wasn't supposed to put HTML code into my submission. For some reason I wound up with "album" in the url where "picture" was needed, even though I brought up each photo separately and copied the url from the url blank at the top of the browser page. Looks like I have the actual photos embedded, now.

Hope your dinner was good, especially since you were doing the cooking.