Project: Sithco Systems .... Done! (kind of)

Hi everyone, long time lurker finally got round to signing up

I'm part-way through a project so I thought I'd make a log. I don't think I've done anything groundbreaking so far but i've exercised quite a bit of planning and patience and so far haven't ruined it which I'm pleased about.

I've had a Lian Li PC-61 for a few years now, and if I can go out on a limb, have never seen a more elegant and practical case in my opinion. I don't really consider the new PLUS series an improvement. The 120mm front grill might be better in terms of airflow but for some reason I just don't think it looks half as refined as the two 80mm squares on the older cases, it's one of the immedeately recognisable things that makes them timeless to me.

So after all that harping on about how great the PC-61 is, i'm slightly ashamed to show this picture of the state I'd let it get into due to various rubbish stuff life threw at me all at once not giving me the time or inclination to look after it for a while..



So now things are back on an 'evil' keel I decided it was time to make it up to this long suffering box. I have a log of events posted elsewhere but it lacks any form of organisation or direction, so I'll bring you up to speed with a better edited chronology and agenda

I decided after initial tidying up and a think that I seemed to be swinging in the direction of playing to the strengths of the case with some sort of Darth Vader/ sith lord homage, using the black anodised aluminium, and incorporating polished metal and red lighting. Now obviously I'm not going to do anything daft like put a helmet and cape on, but maybe with a bit of thought we might end up with something that at least evokes something pleasingly evil and efficiently imperial such as a Tie-fighter pilot might check his emails on...

Some random pictures for possible inspiration as to where things are heading in a very abstract sense,





We're talking black, silver, red and orange, and it seems to work.
I'm not sure quite how long each post can be, so I'll leave this here as an introduction and get on with writing up the progress so far.

 

Stage 1:

Marking out a new enlarged hole for the Thermochill fan grill,


A couple of hours with a coping saw and a dremel and we get to the point below. The edges beneath the grill still need a small amount of cleaning up but at this point it's close enough for jazz and I'll deal with that in the final stages of the build. There's some generic fans and Lian Li fixers holding it all together at the moment but they won't be there for long. It looks a hell of a lot better already, but let's face it that wouldn't be too hard


Stage 2:

Let's put some castors on it. Why? Why not? I like Castors for some reason, I think they're neat.


As well as the internals needing a good clean you can see there's still a couple of bolts that need cutting down to size, which i'll sort next time I do some work on it and can't think of anything more exciting to do instead.

Stage 3:

Some work on the front panel...
Firstly a vandal resistant switch, wouldn't really be a Lian Li mod without one. It doesn't even count as a mod really probably. I deliberately avoided an illuminated switch, for the purposes of the look I'm going for I think this will look much more in keeping,


You can see the reset switch below is missing. I never use it so I thought I'd put something else there, a power LED to be exact. I know the front of the case already has one but I'm going to use that and the HDD LED for something else later. Here's my attempt to make an LED holder for the hole by drilling out and polishing a flat pack furniture bolt, ignore the fingerprints!


I was quite pleased with it considering I made it myself, but just couldn't get it to the nice finish I wanted so eventually caved and bought one designed for the purpose which I'll grudgingly admit looks much nicer than my effort


Stage 4: The fun spending money part!

The new D5 Vario,

Which incidentally shipped without the fixings to actually attach the pump to its mounting bracket. Very helpful

A Repack Slot-in res. Very chuffed with this, it's a good quality bit of kit.



One of 2 Akasa Amber 120mm fans. They look awful with the case and will need a paint job...


A piece of angled aluminium for making radiator support rails.


Other things on the list to make my debit card cry are a new Thermochill rad to replace my heatercore which I bought thinking was copper but is in fact aluminium and giving me all the usual problems, and a new modular PSU (more on which later)

Stage 5: Latest progress...

Radiator mounts


And here they are installed

Note the upturned tab of aluminium of the right hand side mount. That stops the rad sliding in further than it's meant to. These may need fiddling with or redesigning to fit the new rad but i've established the principle is sound. One of the main aims of this build is to overcome the limitations of the previous one and make everything a lot more user friendly to put together and take apart.

Next step, two Akasa Ambers with blades thoroughly taped over (I used nearly a full roll lol) and frames given three coats of matt black spraypaint. But what will they look like when the tape comes off? :-\

They look grey in this picture because my camera is for want of a better word slightly 'unpredictable'...




Actually pretty funky I think!



And let's test fit it all together and have a look at how it's going to look. I think it works better than i'd hoped for so I'm pretty pleased with the direction everything's going in so far. You can see the plastic fixers have now been exchanged for M3 socket head bolts as is the custom







And that's where I'm at so far. I have a mountain of ideas, many of which I won't use, but more would certainly be appreciated.

A good start would be a better name for the project *hint*

Thanks for reading

 

Looks quite nice and understated so far. No idea of a good name tho. Sorry.

 

I like the paint job on the fans, What kinda paint was that?

Keep up the good work on the case


Cheers, WarriorRocker

 

Hi, just used a small can of matt black Plastikote. Cost me about £2.50 and I used the whole can on the two fans in three thin coats. I was actually quite chuffed how good the finish turned out on them, it looks like it was done by someone who had a clue what they were doing rather than me

The next stage is to order a thermochill PA 120.2 to replace my heatercore. There's one small thing I wouldn't mind thoughts on, and that's using right angled rather than straight fittings on it which would make routing the piping in the case much easier. Now I've been water cooling for about three years or so, but as you can probably see from the first picture in my log i've sort of slipped out of the scene for a while and my theory is a bit rusty. From what I understand (or did), although using two right angled barbs will slow the flow, the decrease in performance will be so negligable that it's worth it if it makes things easier to install?

Cheers for the feedback and stay tuned for more updates as I put some of my other nefarious schemes into practice...

 

Looking promising so far. Dont worry about your first picture, my comp looks like that all the time while I find new stuff to do to it, I just slop it back togeather for lan parties.

I like the fans, I am doing an orange/black theme with my V1000, I might have to steal that idea from you

What kind of grill is that?

 

Those fans set in place already look great.

Name? Sithco Systems.....sorry, bad joke.

 

From what I understand abut watercooling, if you do put the bends on the radiator, it will only reduce the flow a little but not much (maybe a couple of degrees in temp) because the flow is hampered but the watercooling would still work. As long as there the only 90* bends.

Keep on going!!
Subscribed

 

Tis a Thermochill 'FG 120.2' made to fit with the Thermochill double rads (one of which is ordered) I took the Thermochill stickers off it because they didn't go with everything else. Still debating what, if anything, I'll replace them with.

In the absence of any better ideas I might just have to go with that temporarily. Now look what you've done

Yep, I agree. I think it'll probably make next to no noticable difference which is all good!

Now gentle readers, journey with me now to a land where diagrams are easily understood and drawn to scale. And then forget all that and look at this:



The main point of this is to try and illustrate how I'm going to try and avoid the problem I had previously the rad and fans took up too much space so the PSU wouldn't fit into the case all the way and hung out of the back by about 3cm. It worked ok, but didn't look all that great. I can do better, I can rebuild!

As you can see, the placement of the fans gives me 16.7cm of space at the rear to fit in a PSU. My current PSU, a 480W Tagan is slightly longer than most at 16cm which would leave only 0.7cm of room for the wiring. Not good.
Irrelevant though because it's getting replaced by an Enermax Liberty 500W
The advantages of this:
1/ Should hopefully have a more stable 12v rail under load.
2/ It's modular meaning I can plug in only the cables I need and route them around the back of the motherboard through a custom hole I will be creating
3/ It's 14 rather than 16cm long which gives me almost 3 golden cm to fit and route the plugs and wiring! BUT I can't afford to waste a single mm of that space which is where the angled shroud comes in...it should allow me to mount the rad further forward so it's both occupying wasted space at the front and more importantly not crossing the red line. It's when you're trying to seamlessly jam water cooling as well as everything else in that you realise quite how small the case is.

Next question is what to make the shroud out of. I'll be doing some cardboard mockups to check the dimensions and fit but I was considering making the final version from illuminated dark red or smoked plexi if i can get hold of some. If I went for smoked plexi, i'm considering replacing the window of the slot-in res with the same stuff to tie the whole thing together.

 

I would go with your idea with making the shround out of smoked plexi. I fyou decide to put the same on the reservior that would look great and alot better if you had some uv dye in the water with some lighting inside - that would be boss!!!!

Also, great job you have done on the fans, the top of the case c'est magnifique!!!!!

 

Cheers for the feedback

I think the smoked is the way to go too. For the res I was planning on mixing red and orange UV reactive dye to try and get the same colour as the top fans. Throughout the whole project I'm trying to stick to just a few colours and themes to keep everything looking neat and co-ordinated.

 

Minor update...

Thermochill PA 120.2 rad arrived


And next to its predecessor, a heatercore. It's markedly smaller but as I understand still appreciably more effecient, and much much easier to implement in the case.



The blue barbs will be sprayed black as soon as I have enough other little bits and pieces together which also need painting, so I can do it in one go.

After a fair bit of searching I also found a supplier on ebay for the smoked perspex (not actually branded perspex but to all intents and purposes the same thing) I was looking for so I've ordered enough, and a fair bit left over in case I need a second attempt, to make the res window. I've also ordered a glossy black opaque sheet to make my angled shroud. With a bit of luck they should be with me by the weekend or early next week.

Next job before that is get the new PSU ordered so I can then make the hole in the back panel to route the cabling. To make all this work in the top of the case easier I'm going to drill out the four rivets holding the top panel on and replace them with screws so the whole thing will be removable

 

Kustompcs sell smoked perspex at £10 a sheet (48cm x 48cm x 3mm) also I think they sell 8mm which you could use on the front of the reservior - as the perspex on the front of it looks quite thick in the picture. (Only if you need some more of course), Also they sell UV Paint which if you decide to use in your case you may be able to paint the blue 90* bends in RED UV to blend in with your colour scheme.

Keep them coming!!!

OldY

 

Mmm yes I am quite a regular buyer from Kustom but sadly all the smoked plexi is out of stock so I went with a seller on ebay instead. Pricewise it worked out about the same. The smoked perspex I bought for the res is actually only 6mm thick compared to the current window which is a whopping 10mm. I decided 6mm would be more than thick enough though, we're not taking this res down to crushing depth in an oceanic trench after all
The black perspex I ordered is 3mm, and that'll be used for the top and bottom fixing plates of the shroud, with the 6mm smoked being used to make the walls.

Tonight's aim is to give the case a good clean and polish inside and sort out the back fan outlet which is currently a sad victim of some previous shoddy modding. I'll try and get some pictures up later on.
I do like your idea about the red uv barbs, I'm still just deliberating whether I'm putting a window in the side yet. if done very very well, I think they look good, but if not, personally I think they can spoil a perfectly good case. I'd have to be very confident in the design and my ability to pull it off neatly before embarking on a window

 

im really a fan of ths...

like the black akasa ambers... also, the Repack res is great and looks fab- ive also got one!

 

Thanks for the feedback, it's what makes modders healthy and strong
I love the Repack res too, it's just so well made. I'm hoping I can get a nice enough finish on my replacement window to do it justice.

This evening I've done a couple of small things which managed to take nearly two hours somehow...

First things first, the remnants of a really old botched mod. I crudely hacked off the back fan grill to lower the volume of the fan and hopefully increase airflow slightly. It didn't make that much difference and looked awful as you can see.


Time to sort this out, and while I'm doing so drill out these rivets as I mentioned earlier to remove the top panel. This will make the case easier to work in and protect the top from damage. it's great how i spend about ten minutes trying to get a clear shot and then when I do every last mote of dust that's landed on the case in the last 24 hours is painfully captured..


Job done! Any modder worth their salt knows the best time to work on a project is when everyone is out of the house so they don't know you were drilling out rivets and grinding down aluminium in the front room with a massively inadequate bin bag as the only means of catching the mess


half an hour of grinding later and a lian Li fan grill placed behind the hole backwards and we have this.

Not breathtakingly exciting I'll grant you, but looks a lot cleaner and neater than before. Like the top fans, the black fixers will be replaced with socket head bolts when I get some more. It might be stretching it a bit but it does have a slight look of that window behind the emperor's chair in return of the Jedi. I won't push that idea too much, it's quite flimsy.

Last stage tonight, a good all over clean with a damp cloth followed by a slightly half hearted buff-up with some mild metal polish. It's looking much less 'used and tired' now I think, and I'll keep coming back to the polishing whenever I'm at a loose end to improve the finish. There are a few scuffs here and there I'm sure you noticed which will need some more serious polishing attention to make good, but I'll sort them in due course.



In other news I hurt my debit card as I'm sure many of you have tonight pre-ordering my Conroe. My bank balance may not be happy but I am.

 

MMMMMM Bling!!!!

 

My paypal payment seemed to take ages to clear, but it did finally and these turned up in the post this morning



To recap, I wanted them to make a radiator shroud and to modify the res to fit in better. Just one snag, when I bought them I thought one would be opaque and the other quite darkly tinted. the 3mm piece is darkly tinted, but the 8mm is not really that tinted at all...and I was going to use that to make a replacement res front as 3mm is a bit thin.

But no matter, I discovered the M4 bolts on the res are actually quite long so I could keep the original cover between the res body and the new smoked front. I like this arrangment as I can be sure it's thick enough to prevent cracks and leaks. This is just a test fit really, both bits of plexi need thoroughly cleaning and polishing as at the moment you can see bits of dirt, fingerprints, and crap sandwiched between them. Still I think it worked quite well...


And here it is in the case



When the res is illuminated from the inside you can see through the front, but I couldn't get a decent picture of that as yet.

 

something you should know. in some enermax liberty psu's does a capacitor suddenly explode and in one case there was a flame out of the back of it. just to mention

 

Mmm, well I haven't actually bought one yet so I'll check that out. I would have done but I seem to have spent *quite a lot* on upgrading to Conroe