Case Mod - In Progress Project: Nutman (update: August 22nd 2011 - FINISHED!)

Nice new stuff you got there. I love the pump res/top, love em.

 

Cool! Tools and hardware! Nice holesaw set! How much was it?
Do they make counter sunk rivets? I didn't realize that. Or is it just that case holes are countersunk?

Also, could you post a pic so I can see what the difference is between the broken impeller housing and the new one? I've never seen one so I don't know what to look for.

 

#22: The holesaw set was on sale - 50% off. Paid 5,33 EUR for it. That's approximately 7,6 U$D. And yes, they make countersunk rivets (http://www.rivetsinstock.com/rivet03.htm) and lots of other rivets - believe me, if you don't need to, don't go there.

I'll post a pic of the new impeller housing as soon as it arrives, don't worry.

 

Ok, a small update while I'm looking for the time necessary to really get some things done on the case.

I drilled out the rivets holding the motherboard tray rails and the HD rack holder. As you can see the bottom has a lot of scratches:





Sanding time! As mentioned before, I bought some sanding paper (wet sanding), but also a cork block:



After 400 grit:



After 800 grit:



After 1200 grit:



And now I polished - after polishing with Autosol:





"Wow! Shiny!", you say? I'm not too happy with the results, and a picture from a different angle using different lighting shows why:



Yep, lots of small scratches that are impossible to remove using Autosol. Which means I have to buy a 230 volts drill, a buffing wheel, some polishing wax and Autoglym Metal Polish to finish the job. This does not come cheap, so I had to think a little.

But then I stumbled upon Darkened's "Orange Monster" casemod at bit-tech.net's casemod forums - he's using carbon foil (he calls it carbon vinyl, but I'm pretty sure we're talking about the same stuff) in the bottom of his case and it looks quite good! I visited Thansen and bought this:



I'm going to use the carbon foil in the bottom and other places that need covering up. Yes, I am lazy at times.

Earlier I mentioned that I had purchased a Laing DDC pumpe that turned out to be worn down.
I the meantime I managed to get half of my money back from the seller and Riska from OC Team Denmark sent me a brand new impeller housing.

It's finally arrived and here's the difference between the old and the new impeller housing:



I little close-up of the old one:



And the new:



Yes, pretty big difference and the impeller is definately spinning much better now (determined by moving it by hand, not electrically). Still haven't tried it with water yet, but I'm sure it'll be great.

Riska also sent me this modified pump housing:



This should make sure that the pump doesn't overheat easily.

I do plan to paint the new pump housing. Yet another task in the pile.

I bought a used Club3D ATI Radeon 4850. The prevois owner had installed Enzotech and Zalman heatsinks on the memory chips and voltage regulators, so it's perfect for water cooling. As you can see, the acrylic I cut for my old 3850 fits the 4850, but the ventilation hole for the backside of the GPU'en needs to be moved a little. I will probably just make a bigger hole to avoid having to make a new plate. Also, it looks like there's enough space for the Crossfire connectors behind the acrylic.:



I will end this update with a picture of my new motherboard - the Abit IX38. Damn, I'm looking forward to assembling this case!

 

Cool pump housing. Nice new mobo.

 

Thanks. Next update will most likely include drilling another hole for a 120 mm. fan, design drawing of special mounting hardware for the pump aaaand some carbon foil work. Stay tuned for more!

 

good progress!

Thanks for showing the difference between the 2 pumps. Very interesting to me.

I thought the inside looked good after sanding, can't wait to see the foil.

Getting new hardware is a lovely feeling, but causes me to get itchy fingers, and want to put everything together NOW!

 

Finally started the assembly phase. This is the fun part of the entire process. It's also the part where progress becomes visible.

I bought some industrial alcohol (for de-greasing the aluminum prior to applying the carbon foil) and Brasso - used the Brasso for polishing the MCW60-R'en:





I also needed a hole for an extra 120 mm. fan and I gave the entire project some thought, test-assembled parts of the PC and made some measuring - then I could mark where I needed to drill a hole for the extra 120 mm. fan - in the bottom of the case:



I borrowed a 114 mm. hole saw and a drill from Boris at h2okoeling.dk and, while risking my life, drilled the 114 mm. hole. I de-greased the case bottom and applied the carbon foil that I had purchased earlier.. Re-riveted the HD rack frame and the motherboard tray rails back on, using standard rivets. Yes, earlier on I mentioned getting countersunk rivets (as the ones I drilled out when removing the parts), but they were impossible to find where I live. This is the result:







Then I took upon me the task of using a Dremel (= copy of a Dremel) for the first time ever and this is what I experienced:

1. Use safety glasses - unless you think you'd love being blind.
2. Use respiratory protection - unless you love iron lungs.
3. Use hearing protection - when you're 60 and able to hear your grandkids, you'll understand.
4. Use the flex shaft - much easier to control than the power tool itself.
5. Make a booth for your dirty work. The cutting dust settles EVERYWHERE!

And yes, I did NOT follow all of these rules, but I will next time - trust me!

But now I'm TOTALLY hooked on cutting aluminum! God damn, it's a great feeling, hehe. If any of you need someone to cut your aluminum case, just let me know.

Aaaaanyway, with iron lungs, tinitus and a gigantic mess on my basement, I present to you a picture of the hole I cut for running the cables from the PSU on the backside of the motherboard tray:



And this cut in the bottom of the 5.25" rack that will make place for the reservoir sitting on top of the pump:





Applied carbon foil to the bottom of the 5.25" rack to cover a lot of scratches:



Visited Studiedata to buy some additional parts, but to my big surprise it ended with Dan at Studiedata handing me over those parts as a sponsor gift! Having said that, I'm not really that surprised, because Studiedata have always been very generous with help, materials and expertise on this project and I've said it before, but it can't be said enough: their customer service ROCKS!

Some pictures of the parts I got at Studiedata:





And finally, a picture of the fan that sits in front of the VGA card. I applied some of the carbon foil to it, in order to cover the fan sticker that was sitting there upside down:

 

Nice Work! I like the pic of the screwdriver reflection! That's some serious polish/lapping.
Nice dremel work. It is a lot of fun, isn't it! Sparks flying, metal disappearing before your eyes... Good safety warnings.
The carbon fiber looks good too, but I'm confused by that last pic. Are you going to cut holes to let the air through?

 

#29: Ah, no, not really. You see, the fan that sits inside that metal frame looks like this:





So, it takes the air that sits around the VGA card and pushes it out of the case.
Not a terribly effective fan, though. Only about 12 CFM and that's running it at 12V. I WILL make it adjustable, to keep down the noise, so it's efficiency will be even lower - hell, it's only supposed to cool the video ram and besides that, it still looks good, so it can stay.

 

Ah, I see! Cool then!

 

I realised that I was still missing some parts (you always think you've bought the last part you'll need, but, apparently, you're always wrong, hehe), so after yet another trip to Studiedata and a visit at Bauhaus I came home carrying these parts:



This 120 mm. filter is supposed to sit under the 120 mm fan in the bottom:



These 120 mm. fans will have their fans removed and will be used as fan shrouds:



Also bought some 3M thermal tape. I decided to use the old pump housing instead of the one Riska sent me (because he had removed the mounting brackets and I really need these for mounting the pump) - but I'll remove the heatsink from the new pump housing, cut it into smaller pieces and attach them to the old pump housing using the 3M thermal tape. Also visited Bauhaus to buy some closed cap nuts that I will use for mounting the radiators and their fans:



... and picked up these threaded bars at the same place. I will cut these into pieces for mounting radiators and their fans:



Cut these bits from the threaded bars:



Finally finished filing the 80 mm. radiator, mounted it using the pieces cut from the threaded bars, the closed cap nuts and the Revoltec silicone 80 mm. gasket - the gasket is usually for minimizing vibrations from the fan, but I use it for minimizing the amount of "fake air" (we call it that in danish, heh) between the radiator and the fan, thereby making sure that whatever air the fan sucks in goes through the radiator:







In order to mount the XSPC X20 Delta V2 block on my Abit IX38 motherboard I had to remove the outer mounting rings (not sure which socket they're supposed to be used for) from the mounting plate, since they touched the heatpipe cooler on the motherboard:





Added some C-strip to the hole I cut for the PSU cables. Not pretty, but since it works fine and it's out of sight, I'm fine with it:



Also cut and filed some hex mesh to make it fit the 120 mm. holes in the top and the 80 mm. hole on the back:







And, as a little surprise to all of you, here's a shot from the 1st test of the re-assembled pump. It works great and looks good, too:

 

Whow, nice pump

 

LOTS of sexy hardware especially the fans and that pump!

Keep it up cuz this is going to look sweet!

 

Well, it's been a loooong time since my last update, but a lot has happened on the project....

I got my cutouts - I had ordered 1 grill for the 2 top fans, 1 grill for the fan in the back and one set of letters spelling the name "Nutman".

The guy making the cutouts thought they'd look better in stainless steel instead of aluminum, so I let him decide - he even made 2 top grills and 2 sets of letters - nice guy!



I removed the protective film from the cutouts and test-mounted the 2 grills:





I had painted the hex mesh cutouts that I earlier fitted to the cooresponding fan holes. Now I had to glue the mesh to the fan grills.

I did that by mounting the grills and put the mesh into the fan holes behind the grills - the grills are a bit smaller the the fan holes, so there was room for glueing the hex mesh to the grills.

I apologize for the picture where I am glueing the mesh on the top grill - it's a little hard to see what's going on, but I put some magazines on top of some wrench tops, putting weight on the hex mesh against the grill.





And this is how it looks when the hex mesh has been glued to the grills and the grills have been mounted:





Did a test-mount of the top fans, too:



Sleeved the cables on the pump:



Made a test-mount of the pump to see how it would sit and test the rubber mountings.

I thought I had to provide extra support rubber to the 2 corners where the pump is not bolted tight, but later that turned out not to be necessary.

But here's how it looked at first:











Attached the filter to the bottom fan:





Well, now we're in november 2008 and I was going to visit a friend for a weekend - all-weekend gaming was on and I had to make the machine ready.

I quickly realised I wasn't able to finish it completely at that time - lots of details had to be done and I had to put the water loop in a my friend's place - I didn't have time for all of this before I headed over to his house.

I assembled the machine as much as I could before I left:



Also made some fan ducts from the Coolermaster fans Studiedata had sponsored:



And yes, the fans (2 x Nanoxia on top, sucking air through the radiator and out of the case and 2 x Noiseblocker XL1 sitting on the underside of the radiator blowing air into the radiator) and the fan ducts provided for a pretty "fat" solution:



Test-mounting the radiator (it may look like there's plenty of room, but as I mounted the front panel for my Terratec soundcard it turned out there was no room for the fan ducts, so they had to go):



Well, set up the loop and started leak testing:









The machine was running fine at my friend's house. The CPU temperature never went above 45 degrees Celcius (according to Coretemp) and, according to ATI's software, the VGA temperature was steady at about 35 degrees Celcius at full load. I don't know hos trustworthy these measurements are, but they appear credible to me.

Ok, my brother-in-law had got me these cool aluminum feet for the case:





I was going to mount them in these holes that are way too big for the bolts that came with the feet:



So I had to manufacture some aluminum discs that fitted into the holes:



The result was quite nice:



Lots of room for the bottom intake fan:



Proceeded to the fitting of the letters on the case sides.

First, I put some painting tape on each side panel and made markings where each letter was going to sit:





I used double-sided tape on the letters, pulled off the protective paper and pushed each letter onto the window side panel:







On the other side panel I experimented used a different kind of double-sided tape (the kind used for rugs and carpets):



Yes, yes - nobody's perfect :



However, some of the letters fell off during the night, from both side panels. So, I have decided to drill holes in each letter and bolt them solidly to the side panels. More on that later...

I got myself a defective Lian-Li case to serve as spareparts for this project.

The first part to be used was the Lian-Li badge, as my case didn't have a badge, for some unknown reason:





Slowly started doing the cable management. It's a hassle - ****ing tedious, but has to be done...





As mentioned earlier, I had been trying to make a LED connector panel for quite some time. I went through several solutions:





None of them pleased me, so I decided to make a cover plate for the 3.5" rack (to sit behind the pump), a cover plate for the 5.25" rack to sit on the back of the TerraTec front panel, and a cover plate for the VGA card. All made of acrylic.

I made these plates:



The cover plate for the 5.25" rack was going to be mounted on the back of the TerraTec front panel (=easier than mounting it in the 5.25" rack itself), so I had to drill 2 holes in the sides on the back of the TerraTec front panel a do threads in these holes:



I put the RCA-connectors in the 5.25" rack cover plate:



Did a test-mount before the paint job:



The cover plate for the 3.5" rack (sitting behind the pump) and the cover plate for the VGA card were looking like this:





The hole for the pump's power cable (that has a molex-connector) had to be drilled bigger in the 3.5" rack cover plate and I also made a big hole in the VGA card cover plate to accomodate for the escaping of hot air from the backside of the GPU.

Then the plates were ready for the paintjob - I also painted the cover of an old Vantec Nexus 101 temperature- and fan control I had, because I was going to use this one for monitoring the pump. It's also possible to attach 3 temperature probes to this unit, but I don't think I will be using those - for now...

Paintjob finished:



Painted the edges with UV-reactive green paint, just like the soundcard and the old ATI Radeon 3850 VGA card.

Mounted some mounting bolts on the VGA card, in order to be able to attach the cover plate to the VGA card:





And then I attached the cover plate:





Soldered resistors and wires to the RCA-connectors:







Mounted the 5.25" and 3.5" plates:



Also did a test-mount of the pump, to check how it would sit and how it was going to look:



The back of the 3.5" plate looks like this:



Started making the plugs for the LED cables. Sleeving and using multiple layers of heat shrink is the way to go:



Studiedata had sponsored some Nanoxia fan controls - these fan controls come with each Nanoxia fan - but they're mounted on PCI brackets to go in the back of the case and I really didn't want them to sit there - too difficult reaching them.
I quickly decided to dismantle these fan controls and mount them in a 5.25" fascia.

It's quite a big task - I measured, made markings, drilled the fascia, dismantled the fan controllers and soldered the necessary wires - all I need to do is some cutting and sanding, aswell as mounting plugs that will allow for me to easily plug in fans to the fan controller.

I got 4 potentiometers at hand and I mean to let 1 potentiometer control the 2 fans sitting on top of the radiator, 1 potentiometer control the 2 Noiseblocker XL1 fans sitting on the underside of the radiator, 1 potentiometer control the fan that sits in front of the VGA card and the last potentiometer control the fan sitting in the bottom of the case.
In that way all 120 mm. fans can be controlled manually, while the 3 lownoise (9 dBA!) 80 mm. fans will run at full speed all the time.

By the way: the 120 mm. fans will be powered by the PSU, to lighten the load on the motherboard. I'm not sure the motherboard will be able to deliver power for 2x120 mm. fans at the same time, but the PSU is able to handle this demand just fine - don't worry, I've tested it. - oh, and the potentiometers also seem to be handling this job in a fine manner.

Here's a picture of the present state of the fan controller:

 

Ok, cable mess all over the place:





Needs to be cleaned up later, once I've mounted the fan controller. And yes, the fan controller is ready!

I started marking where the holes for the potentiometers were to be drilled. Then I stabilized each potentiometer by cutting the existing PCI brackets to fit inside the 5.25 slot cover used as face plate for the fan controller:





Another reason for re-using the original PCI brackets is that it will stop the potentiometers from moving when adjusting the fan speed. There's a small tap on each potentiometer:



However, these taps are to high to allow for the cut-down PCI brackets to sit tight with the 5.25" slot cover, so they had to be sanded down a bit:



Next, I mounted the potentiometers and soldered all the wires:



... and mounted the knobs:



Testing the fan controller:



It works perfect, of course!

Ok, I put the fan controller where it had to go and tried to clean up the cable mess behind the front cover of the case:









Also, I'd like to show you some of the LED cable management:







Mounted the radial fan:



Also bought some faster RAM. It's so cheap now, I just couldn't stop myself:



And here it sits in the machine. Plenty of room behind the hoses:



I had to redo the water loop, because some of the hoses started forming kinks here and there.

Here's the new loop:



If you look really hard you can see something black on the hoses under the VGA card. It's a piece of velcro I had to put there in order to protect the hoses from the hot RAM heatsinks on the VGA card:



All UV cathodes are in place. There's 1 in the bottom (see picture in an earlier post) and 2 sit in the top, 1 on each side of the radiator. It's a weeee bit hard to make pictures of the top UV cathodes, but I managed to get a snapshot of one of them. Not much room up there:



On the motherboard, just below the ATX-socket, there's a LED that lights up when there's power on the board. Of course, it's red and this doesn't quite fit my colour scheme, so I had to cover it as much as possible.

I mounted some double-sided tape on the backside of a piece of foam rubber and put a similar piece of black tape on the top - I thought the foam rubber would be so flexible that it would cover the surface-mounted LED pretty good, but that wasn't quite the result. It DOES block most of the red light, but not all of it. I will have to make a better solution later:



Started mounting the letters on the sides of the case.

I bought a 2 mm drill and countersink drill for stainless steel and used my new, lovely drill press to make nice holes in the letters:



Here's the first letter:



If you take a look on the back, it does matter where the bolts go - if you look closely you can see that I had to move the first letter a bit up, because the bolts were blocking the correct fitting of the side panel:



All letters mounted on both side panels:





The bolts were too long:



So they had to be cut shorter:



Now, the side panels sit nicely. It's starting to look like a computer!





Actually, the computer is very close to being done.

All that's left is some polishing and some small details.

For instance, the CPU cooler is rather greasy and needs to be polished:





The very final update will come "soon".

 

Dude I must say that that looks awesome, very nice work. I can't Wait for the final update.

 

3rd to last pic looks like it flares at the bottom.. trippy effect

nice case!

 

Heh, flares? It's a white towel

 

lol nah i ment like the panel bends out at like 20 degree angle