Here I am with my first little mod, just to warm up my tools I' am going to build a case from scratch that will be the new house for my HTPC. The machine is made with: Mobo asus M3A78-EM (vga on board and hdmi output) Cpu Amd X2 4850e (tdp 45w) , PSU Corsair 450w Ram 2x1 giga , LG combo blur-ray player/ cd-dvd writer HD Samsung 250 gb sata2 card reader and so on will be defined leter All the items listed before are more or less one years old but enought to play bluraydisc, play some music, look @ pictures from digital camera. Till now the hardware skipped from a rough cardboard box, to an hold "white-dirt" case but at the end I decide to build a custom case. I tought to build a slim case, but the possibility to upgrade the system, for example with a vga, would be a little bit compromised and also an external psu was necessary :-/ Not a good solution for me. The key elements of the new idea are the integration of the psu, the possibility to upgrade the system with a dedicated vga-card, keeping at the same time the whole case as small as possible. The name of the project “NSS” stand for “Not So Slim” because the case is not slim as I tought Let's mod.... The base for this case is an hold compaq desktop. After removing some rivets I am ready to cut the right side of the plate because half case it's enough. Here is the base for the new case. There are some holes for the mobo support ( i didn't know the right name in english ) just to test the hw position. That's all for the moment.... Ciao Dot Kappa
The case will be Not So Small , but with the psu in position of the previous image......my htpc will be too high After cutting the plate..... Now the psu is around 2cm below the metal plate thanks to the hole and some temporary feets. I'll made a kind of box to keep in place the psu, but later because now it's time to define the front of the case. For this section I recycled a very long aluminium rail taken from my hold kitchen, simply the skirting board!!! Some dust With this reliefs it's easy to fix it to the case with angular profile Panel in place Don't worry about the gap between the two parts,I already have an idea Ciao Dot Kappa
Hi guys, here I am with some updates! Let's skip from the front side to the rear one I took the frame from and old case, but it was too long so I've done a little cut on the "pci-side" and two holes in order to fix it to the base with two temporary screws. To hold up the Blu-ray drive I take two flat aluminium bars (2 cm wide and 2 mm thick). I bended and drilled their terminal points to fix them to the front panel reliefs and, to the other side, on the rear frame. Supports assemleb Must be levelled Between the fan and the BR drive there is, more or less, 1 cm.... I think it's enough also considering that is a "coold cpu". In the next step you'll see noise killer and supports to take the drive in place front door for the carriage drive Ciauz
Scratch Build Project NSS-HTPC 16-July-10 For the noise-killer I looked at a solution found in a JJ McTiss project.... a rubber tubing like the one you can find in bicycle wheels. I looked around form something similar and I found this broken wheel. Perfect!! This is the rubber tubing I found inside ...after a little cut I obtained thin noise killer for the optical-drive. This is for the bottom side and will be fixed at the alluminium supports plate trough adhesive tape. To prevent the drive from going around for the case I made two kind of supports each with noise-killer. The first one fix the drive on the rear side, as you can see in the images below. I used the same alluminium plate (2mm thick) bended with the help of a clamp. The other kind of support is a rectangular one, made with alluminium 1 mm thick. I take advantage of the drive's holes to fix the two supports Now that noise killer are in place I can draw the line for the front hole Making the holes, to slot in the jigsaw blade, the drill moved a little bit and that means an extra work with file The cover doesn't look so bad even if must be refined That's all for today. In the next step you'll see (bettere photos ) the right side of the chassis with probably a PSU grid to strengthen the whole case. Ciao
