Case Mod - In Progress Project Perennial P182

It's Happening!!

The last bit of structural work to my case was to hide the cable holes from the original P182 design, with the help of an aluminium blanking plate.

Before...



After...



And now my rig is finally at a point where I can start installing stuff!

I didn't take a photo of it, but I had to sand down little cable holes on the edge of the acrylic 'light shield' as the shield was so close to the edge of the case there wasn't any room to pass the cables through.

Here's all the motherboard cables prepped under the mobo area...



And here's the motherboard and GPU finally installed for real!



I know I'm teasing the lighting a lot, but I really can't wait to get all the components wired up and lit up at the same time...



I've started cabling up things in the case now, but still have a few custom cables to make and others to sleeve, so there's quite a bit to do yet, but that now looks like this...



...and while I'm on the path of starting to install final components, I had a go at putting the pump and a few of the fittings in...



All good so far!

Now you might think that I'm just a few power cables and WC tubes away from finishing this build, but I've hit a problem that I'm not yet sure how to solve.

The fittings that I planned on using here...



..don't actually fit.

When I measured up, there was supposed to be a tiny bit of tubing between the 90° fitting and a regular compression fitting. But with this Primochill tubing I've now got, my Alphacool compression fittings don't close completely (the tubing OD is slightly too big) and as such there isn't enough room to fit the second screw cap onto the tubing while pushing the second barb in.

So I can't screw the second compression fitting closed.

Now I have to find a new fitting/combination of fittings that will bridge this tight 90° corner.

I was so close to this all being perfect!

 

Fix Some Things, Break Some Things...

I couldn't find a fitting combination that would bridge my bulkhead/reservoir gap properly, so had another play with my existing fittings.

I realised that I might have better luck with the super soft Tygon E1000 that I had left over, as at the very least I could close the fittings properly with that tubing giving me precious millimetres to work with...



...and better luck I had.

The alignment is still a few mm off, but it is now all fitted and sealed properly so I'm happy it's the best I can do.

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Rather than leave leak testing until the final step, I realised I'd have a chance to partially test my loop whilst all the power cables etc were not yet installed.

It's a good job I did, as I found a pretty substantial leak from one of the AquaComputer inline temp sensors at the top of the radiator.

Figures it was in the most inaccessible point of the loop though. :-/



I'd somewhat foolishly not left a big enough cut out to get a spanner at these fittings, and so had a fun job of trying to unscrew it with very restricted access.

I got it in the end though, and discovered the o-ring had not seated properly, so wasn't sealing.

That was corrected easily enough and then I had the equally fun job of re-attaching it to the radiator.

Only to accidentally do this just as I was finished tightening the fitting...



Absolute nightmare.

Hinges on the panel have snapped clean off, and I've somehow managed to split the door stop/top magnet bit too.

I'm hoping I might be able to drill out the remains of the plastic hinges and replace them with some small metal rods, but I don't know if it'll work. Failing that I think my only other option will be to glue the hinge in place! >_<

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Oh, and as if that wasn't annoying enough, when I filled the partial loop again to give everything one last once over I was greeted with this noise from the Flow Meter:



It's apparently a pretty common problem, but somehow I'd failed to come across it before I'd bought one.

So now have to start an RMA process to see if I can get one that doesn't have the ticking noise.

 

damn that sucks

 

Lighting, Done! ...Well, Kinda

Tell me about it! >_<

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I realised that I'd forgotten to route the USB cable for my Aquaero, so had to strip the motherboard once again to route it under there, and then hook up the USB cable to an existing motherboard connector.

So the new under-motherboard cable routing looks like this:



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Whilst I made the GPU LED strip with a disconnect point above the motherboard, I left so little cable to keep it hidden it's a royal PITA to connect. Still, it's better than having to strip the motherboard every time I need to take the GPU out!



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Next on the project was soldering up enough LED splitter cables to turn all the lights on at once!



I love how the spill light subtly illuminates the surrounding components.

Once again, it wasn't all good news though; I hadn't hooked up a splitter wire to the reservoir LEDs, so had to run its control box from a makeshift ATX PSU > DC Jack cable and in doing so I think I shorted the DC in leads for a second (or there was some residual moisture from when I'd test filled the loop earlier) and the LEDs sparked and smoked.

They didn't completely die, but now the green channel is permanently stuck on, and it's sods law its in the least possible accessible part of my LED runs to fix. >_<



This build just doesn't want to finish up cleanly!

 

I absolutely love that edge around the motherboard.

I am sorry but at some point I will have to steal that idea from you.

 

Good News Everyone!

Honestly, it looks so good I sometimes can't comprehend that I'm the first person to have done it!

...I wonder how much a patent on this would cost...

Be sure to link back to my project log when you do steal it.

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Good news!

Despite the LEDs smoking, and what appears to be part of the copper trace superheated (it burnt the back of the plastic strip clean off) it was only the RGB controller box that has suffered lasting damage. So using my second RGB box the LEDs work properly.

*Phew!*

I popped the casing off of the broken controller box, and can't see any damage to the PCB/components, so I'm suspecting the green wire inside the connector lead fused to the other ones. Fortunately I can get away with using just one RGB controller for now, and it might actually spur me on to set up an arduino RGB controller once everything is done for this phase.

 

I think you're not going to be the only one stealing that idea, it looks awesome

Send you a DM about the door DeMob, sorry for the delay :/