Well guys, after a lot of planning, designing, digging, hunting, and buying, I've finally started building another case that I can actually show you guys. Hopefully those of you newer to acrylic can also learn from a couple of my mistakes, by the way... The design is another acrylic cube (I can hear the "ugh..." now). But this time, I've designed the case around the key feature of accessibility. Every time I've seen or worked with a cube case, I find that the space inside is cramped and filled with hard-to reach spots. The goal of this case is to remove those "difficult" areas and make it fairly easy to reach every single spot in the case. It will also be watercooled, with the reservoirS (yep, plural) built right into the walls. This provides extra security when transporting the case (can be moved full), and makes filling/bleeding a snap. I hope you like the design...feel free to leave comments, suggestions, ideas, etc.! Oh, and thanks for reading.
Day 2 Day 1 unfortunately got lost on the computer that is disassembled for building purposes, so hopefully I can go back and edit it in later. It was comprised of the cutout of the 10"x12" motherboard tray out of blue fluoro acrylic (UV reactive). To do this, I cut the acrylic with my dremel using a rotary-saw (ala Rotozip) attachment. This thing is USEFUL!!! I'll illustrate on other cuts that I have to make later on. I also cut a 5.5" piece of smoke acrylic to work as part of the back of the cube. The cube's total outside dimensions are 12.5"x12.5"x12.0" (don't ask). Day 2 - Monday 16.05.2005 With the motherboard tray cut (ROUGHLY, I might add), it was time to start glueing things together. To glue, I used IPS Weld-on 4. It stinks to high heaven, and is best applied with a needle applicator, but works like a charm. The pictures above show the glued product of the motherboard tray, the 5.5" backplate, and the bottom 12"x12" piece. As you can see, holes were cut in the motherboard tray where the mobo didn't need standoffs...this is to facilitate cable running later on, moving some of the ugly cables quickly out of sight. It will also allow me to embed some LEDs in the tray, making its edges glow (as well as create a glow from under the mobo). Some of the standoffs are in place, but I'll get to the ghetto fashion of how they arrive on the tray later as they were removed shortly anyhow. Unfortunately, my cuts for the motherboard tray were a little bit rough. So, to straighten them up, I made myself a jig out of a couple quick-clamps and a carpentry t-square. With the collar attachment on the dremel (came with the spiral saw...told you it was useful!), I put on a sanding head and cleaned up the lines one by one... After a while, it became much easier to do it with the motherboard tray off of the other pieces again. So when it was all tidied up, it was time to glue it back together... Here you see the great mistake...Since the acrylic was without its paper cover now, I used paper towel to protect the edges of it from getting scratched as I glued it. However, weld-on has a water-like consistency, meaning that it runs through a crack like Grant took Richmond. Since the stuff actually SOFTENS the acrylic so that it can bond together, the paper bonded too!!!!!!! After removing the paper, I was left with this: A not so friendly reminder of Brawny's quilted paper towels, now fused to my case. This will be fixed tonight by milling out a 1/8" thick part of this back edge and putting in a piece of opaque black acrylic. After this joint was set, I began to attach this piece to the only side plate that it would be connected to (remember, accessibility is the idea here). So, lesson firmly in hand, I began to bond the side plate to the bottom plate MINUS paper towel. And the joint setting.... With the bottom joint fairly set, it was time to attach the motherboard tray to the side panel, providing extra stability. This was a little difficult in the engineering, because the back panel had welded at just an ever-so-slight angle, making the joints not line up properly. This was fixed with a little extra clamping, and some extra weight applied from above. I left this to cure overnight, so that hopefully tonight I can begin working on the placement of some of the components. I'm not sure if the motherboard tray will be capable of supporting the weight of a full ATX motherboard without one more brace in the front corner, but I'm going to test that theory tonight (hopefully things should be fairly well cured by then). A brace shouldn't hinder the accessibility of the case much, though I'd love to avoid it if I could. Power supply, pump, and a single 120mm radiator will fit under the motherboard, while the disk drives and reservoirs will be at the front of the case. Stay tuned!
Thanks! The pics are all links. Give them a click (thumbnails) and they'll take you to a full size pic. I try to be kind to people with smaller bandwidth.
Day 3 and 4 Day 3 - Tuesday 17.05.2005 Because of the need to make sure the acrylic bonded properly, the acrylic set for an extra day. During this time, I made plans for the drive bays, which were cut for me to begin creating on day 4. The result of the glue job when all of the clamps were taken off: The PSU and hard drives were an attempt at an alternate drive fitting, now scrapped (the fitting, not the drives!). The motherboard standoffs were put in place by actually clamping the chuck of my drill down onto them with no bit (those hex sides are nice!) and screwing them into the unthreaded holes. Kind of ghetto, but it worked like a charm. Day 4 - Wednesday 18.05.2005 After test-fitting the mobo, I found that it was too heavy to not bend the tray at least a little in the unsupported corner. Having expected this, I had already begun to design my drive bays as a support. By using a slightly l-shaped side bracket, I could mount the DVD-RW drive vertically (mine will eventually be replaced with a slot-load), with the HDDs under it. This would fit in the corner where the mobo tray required bracing. So, I began the work on my DVD-drive bay...Here you can also see the motherboard test-fitted onto its tray to make sure that I don't cover up any of the necessary IDE ports. Oh, and my beer. Because modding is just better with a beer. Since the DVD drive would be vertical, I figured some type of "stop brace" at the bottom would be a good plan. Though the bay itself is just wide enough that the front of the drive supports it before it is screwed in, the extra support wouldn't hurt anything. In this picture you can clearly see the bending of the mobo tray, which inspired this drive bay positioning... Once the drive bay was set up, it was time to glue it into the case so that the motherboard could be supported. At this time, I was getting anxious to test-fit some drives and power this up...particularly since I was disassembling my fiancee's computer at the same time (got her a new mobo), so there was not a single working computer in the house. After glueing, several pieces got a test-fit. The semi-completed project sat on my floor last night and this morning, powered up... Tonight and tomorrow, I hope to get the holes in the back drilled for the PSU, as well as get to work on the hard drive enclosures. Comments, suggestions, and ideas always welcome. Thanks for reading, guys!
It will be. But I'm going to build the blocks at home, and am just waiting on a little bit of $$ to get the mill kit I need. You'll see the res get built into the case as I go on.
If you want to try heat-warping even a cheap 60w heat gun can create enough heat to warp 1/4" sheets of acrylic. I bought an embossing/paper-moulding heat-gun at Michael's for $10 and it works fine.
Oooh! Really? That little thing will warp 1/4"? I will have to try that, then! Thanks for the tip, Cap'n!
click and then? Just another little thumb opening in a new window, I think a little error in the code...
Hmmmm, you should be seeing a 1280x960 or so picture when you click on them Gaoske...I tested it in both IE and FF...
Hehehehehehe...yeah. They ummm, well, haven't been cleaned in a little... Particularly the NB, because it's not even operating right now. Damn thing seems to make an incredibly loud noise when on, so it's just a passive. If you can believe it, that's little more than a month and some of collection...and the pic was taken while it was running, which may account for a little of the "grey" look.
I just had the same problem, you gotta allow pop-ups (at least thats what i did (in the poppy up bar under the address bar in IE)) and it worked for me.
