STEALTH:: LIAN LI TRANSFORMATION! 12/07 new pics

that looks well the alu, and the black go well together keep up the good work

 

/me holds head in my hands
NOOOOOOOO!!!!!


I was going to do the cd-rom relocating in my next mod and thought it would be original!!!

Nice implementation and form on yours though!

 

Never mind Dad. Do it anyway (and you can give me a cookie now too for working out your sig).

 

/me wants one too, that was almost too easy

Next time do it in hex

Very nice job with that Lian-Li, I think Jack has started a trend

 

This looks pretty god, makes me wish i got a Li meself.

And dad , can i have a cookie

 

Looks good

I've seen a lot of PCs with optical drives at the bottom and power switch way up the top. The PSU is also at the bottom in a lot as well, and it just looks dodgy. I'm talking about prebuilt systems from stores of course. This mod looks really cool

 

Hehe

Very nice bud !! im gonna have to nick 1 idea that panel on the top looks sweet

 

UPDATE TIME!!!

It's been awhile and i've been fiddling with the case A LOT. A lot has changed! First of all, I was looking at it one day and i thought to myself... this case doesnt really fit the title of this project... it STILL looks too much like a LIAN LI! So the front just had to be redesigned!! Well enough of the mumbo jumbo.. i'll explain the rest as I post some pictures!!

The basic idea that I had was to just cover the front of the aluminum with black plexi so the front would be black! I first started by cutting out a square plexiglass.. I saved myself a lot of tinting time by buying myself some tinted plexiglass! It was also thinner than my previous piece so it was fun to work with.


I basically marked out the lines of where to cut with a ruler..

I got myself a new tool for cutting.. thanks to gnome

The hacksaw cut the pieces pretty straight.. very little need for filing!


Next I got my original front (it've been messing with it so much that it looks pretty messed up!

I then drilled holes onto my original lian li front so that I can screw on the plexi with cap screws.. I already drilled out the appropriate holes for the VFD and my switches from before..

I then took off the paper to get a basic idea of what it might look like...



I then added my vfd cover and my switches onto the front to get a better idea of wut it may look like...


I then cut out another panel to fit over the middle section. Two holes were cut again for my switches to go through...





There is the top and middle put together... So wut do you think? Wanna kno what i think? I didn't like it at all!!!! Let's see.. for the first front that i've created, that alone took me about 4 to 5 different plexi covers. Each one was spent about a few hours. So 4 to 5 is like 15 hours of work! Trashed..... Then I thought of this design... and I DID have a lot of problems still getting it right and i ended up making two of each plexi panel to get it right. That took FOREVER!! And after doing all that, the results did not make me happy at all............. So what did i do? I threw it away and thought of a new one

 

OMG I WROTE A WHOLE PAGE AND MY COMP MESSED UP!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

edit** i went over this post and added more details


Anyways i basically made a new front but instead of having different sections like before, i made 1 whole piece because its a lot nicer and sexier!! It makes it look more classy and elegant rather than some bulky design like I had before. I thought the first design i made was actually pretty cool but too bad it looked too much like the original case. Oh well. The front was cut out with a hacksaw again and then was filed. I wanted to polish the edges but i'm not sure how I would do it because of the tint. I guess the only way to do it is to sand as the torth method would just melt the tint.


Here I drilled out all the holes for the switches. Also note that in order to screw the panel to the front of the lian li cover with cap screws, I had to drill out 8 holes. The holes were 1/2 mm away from the edge of the panel. It was hella close. If i would've moved over a LITTLE bit it would've just went through. I guess i got lucky! The vfd aluminum cover was there temporarily as I did not use it at the end. The cdrom drives again were cut out for the front. Instead of using the plates that i had before i decided to go with a much better look of just having the tray like in project bliss. This is weird cuz its like deja vu i'm not sure if i said this already or not. LOL damn computer!


I used the cut outs as a template to mark up the covers for the front. How I did this was pretty much explained in the beginning of this project log. But before, I kind of just cut randomly to get enough clearance for the cd trays to come out as i was going to cover the holes w/ the aluminum cover. But since i'm not doing that anymore, preciseness was an issue. I also ended up filing a lot in order to get the edges smooth.

Next up i got myself a little fan controller. Considering how im going to be watercooling ill only have 2 fans in my case. The original one in the back of the lian li and the fan on the radiator. This device is perfect as its compact and works nicely.


It came with a nice little drilling template and was drilled out using my dremel tool. It was later enlarged with a series of drill bits to get the required size.



Here i had to cut out some more of the inside to accomodate for the fan controller. The bottom of the lian li had to be flush with the ground or else the cdrom drives would get caught going through or they would be uneven and messed up! So i basically used my jigsaw and cut away the excessive material. The tool made that job painless.. if i had to use my dremel i wouldve probably destroyed 40 discs before finishing lol. Some tools are just not meant for me!

Next up is a neat little device i picked up while frantically searching for the pc rider kits. I could not find them at alll!!! But instead i stumbled across this nifty little product. It's basically a lit that flashes the LEDS but it only flashes on HDD activity. So when the hard drive loads, the leds go from left to right (i think). The kit usually comes with green and red leds but a blue one can be purchased for a little extra.


The kit came with a nice little template as well and was drilled out with the dremel. The dremel can give very accurate holes beacuse its much easier to handle than an actual drill. The only bad thing is that it only comes with 1 size to fit the small dremel head. Its perfect for making starting points!

Here i superblued the leds right underneath the fan controller. Very little room but i manged to pull it off! I'm sorry but i wrote A LOT for this thread i dont know why it had to mess up on me. I am so pissed off you can't imagine. But anyways, lets move on...

 

The next thing I got was the good ol' musketeer kit! Originally, I had the newq underneath the switches. To me, i thought it was pretty cool, but the fact that the newq is not centered really pissed me off. SO i wanted something that was actually symetrical so it wouldn't look strange. THus, i got myself the musketter. It's expensive though Since my theme is black silver with red lights, i attempted to change the colors of the musketter to red. It's a pain in the ass to open if anyone has tried. But after i did, I realized that there was a blue film like cover behind the circles. SO it's blue LEDS flashing into the blue film to create the effect. There was no way of taking out the film so I just went ahead and changed all the leds to red. After 2 hours of work (im VERY bad at soldering) all the leds turn on BRIGHT! But to my shock, they did not go through the blue film at all! There were like little red dots behind a blue film. It looked terrible so i spent another hour reattaching the blue leds.


I got myself the black version to match my theme...
Next up, after reading the bliss project... ( i luv that case!) I realized that he got himself a VU meter!! My impresion was probably the same as his when he first saw it. I was like So i went over to hobbytron and got myself a set Upon powering it, i burned it out somehow and it was dead. But then Mark was nice enough to have it fixed for me so I'm just waiting for it to get shipped back. In the mean time, I drilled out some holes for it to shine through!


I drilled out the appropriate holes for the leds. They come in 5 mm leds and to me, 5mm leds are butt ugly. Throughout the case, I stuck with only 3mm LEDS because they look a lot nicer when they're small. So in order to make the holes for the leds, i decided to instead of drilling out 5mm leds, i drilled a series of 1mm holes. Although i cannot shine the leds directly into it, just having the lights on its side fits perfectly. You can see the lighting very well throughout the small holes and it looks awesome. Since the kit comes with 2 meters, i drilled out 2 sets of 10 holes!

Again this is what the front looks like so far. Lotsa new goodies packed into it

Next up is the CDROM drives!
Boy did i have a lot of problems with this! Upon reading gnomes case, i was so amazed with the lighted eject buttons (jacks case too) that i just had to do that too. It looked really easy too. So i took the dvd drive out of my current case.. soldered all the appropriate connection, and wala! It turns on nice and bright! After a few min, the cdrom refused to eject and then it made this grinding sound and then the drive was dead. So then I busted out my next cdrom drive, a 48x lite on cdrw. What i wanted to do was to extend the eject button to one of my switches on top. i just COULD NOT figure out how to make the connections ( i started a thread in the electronics forum too) and after fiddling w/ it for a long ass time, the eject button stopped working. Drive #2 dead. I was pissed off! So then, i decided to just stick w/ the lighted eject buttons idea and got myself a new plextor 16x dvdrom drive as well as a plextor 8x dvdrw. Messing up on either of these drives would've caused me to kill myself, especially the dvdburner!
Since I was so scared of messing up, i didnt take any pictures at all. If you wanna know how i did it, read ghomes article, i did exactly the same thing. Thanks man Except i didn't make my eject buttons look as cool as his...



IT WORKS!!! I powered 2 leds in each eject button for maximum brightness. I think i was so happy i started dancing and singing to myself ............ looks neat too. For some reason, my camera has a hard time taking red lights. It actually is friggin bright! The camera makes it look dull but i assure you it's not!

I then started drilling out the hole for the front for the bottom drive first (the dvd burner) and tested to see it fit.


The plextor burners are really cool. The trays come painted in black so I didn't have to paint it myself! I tested it to see if they both went through perfectly without getting stuck...

 

The next thing I did was I got my cutted cdrom covers and i stuck it onto the trays using double sided tape. In order to accomodate for the lack of thickness, i made the tape thicker by stacking up layers in order for the tray to fit flush with the front as seen! Sexy!!! Glowing eject buttons.. MmMmm


Here's a story of my switches. You realize that they are completely different ones. Why? Because the switches that i had before did not work! Zapwizard told me it was some kind of diff switch i forgot wut its called but they dont work! They arent the normal on/off push button switches. So they had to go I paid about $40 U.S. for those too. So i had to replace them. Instead of getting similar looking ones, i decided to go for MUCH sexier ones. LIke project bliss, i got the four switches on the top from jameco, they are very shiny and sexy. They were $10 each though Next i got myself TWO RED vandal resistant switches for the power and reset. The holes had to be enlarged in order to fit. The vandal resistant switches were 20 each. That's 80 dollars on switches But anyways, i think it looks REALLY sexy now. I'm glad i completely changed the front again!!! No more covers! i'm sick of it !! In these pictures you can see the vfd turned on as well as the musketter. The musketeer is cool because you can only see the 3 blue circles and not the drive itself I love tint!

Here is the pc turned off. With flash, the window tint is helpless as the light will shine through...

Without flash, it's as mysterious as it gets! Pure blackness for the vfd and the musketeer


Here I basically just wired a whole bunch of 3mm RED leds to make the front bling a lot more. They were all taken from random places that had 12 voltes suplied. The fan controller.. etc.

And for the final pics of the front!! Dum Dum DUm

Here is it w/ all the leds and stuff turned on with flash as well. The flash really kills it sometimes or maybe i just suck w/ lighting. But the painted plexiglass is still shiny as hell.



Bright and shinY! i like it!! Again the cdrom eject buttons are actually really bright! what is wrong with the damn camera! please note! : Under the fan controller there is still a blue led chaser for hdd activity as mentioned (u can see the holes). I can't preview it cuz theres no hardware in the case to preview it! SO use your imagination for now! Blue lights flashing left and right on hdd activity.. MmMm
Also, note that the 2 1mm 10 holes side by side w/ the vandal resistant swtiches will have a vu meter in it soon! More light dancing with the music! They come in green yellow and red, so a little change in colors. Since the 1mm holes are so small, they dont really affect the overall theme of colors, and adds a little spice to it Well that's it for the front! hope you enjoyed the update. It's been awhile But i've gone through OH SO MANY FRONT COVERS! I HATE I I HATE I HATE IT! LOL it was terrible!!! But yeah i'm proud of the results Since my last update, i've been spending EVERYDAY with the front. So that's a lot of time spent! Until next time!

 

well done m8 top stuff

 

Wow, nice job! You have my admiration .

 

That looks really great there dude, keep it up man, good job.

 

Very nice man! I've yet to see a dissapointing piece from you.

I've been having exactly wht you just did flaoting around in my head for a week now,cept i wanna use a black case.

 

could u not mod the musketeer to have red leds to match all your other stuff

 

I did try... read the post before this one A few post up to be exact! I tried and failed. I guess i'll have to wait till they make a red one... Besides i have blue leds (chaser kit) the vfd writing is in blue.. i think it kind of gives contrast instead of just red bulging out at you if you know what i mean

 

this is great man, i actually liked the first one and even the second but the third is always a charm

 

hmm that is fantastic, but i think i prefer it when u cud still see some of the alu? the way it is now you cant see the cases roots at all if you get me. Still, very well done though

 

i didnt fully cover the front! i left a lil of the edge... if that matters..