Scratch Build – Complete The Monarch

My previous builds have been named after animals. As in I build them and it reminds of this animal so that's its name. But I decided to go all out with my first water cooled PC and also scratch build it. So sketched.



Then I rendered (kinda, I'm definitely a beginner)



Then I built. It's mostly fabricated out of 1/8" aluminum sheet.





I built the wings out of poly carbonate (scrap from work, I paint for a sign company)



And then I painted the main case with a marble and candy paint job.





It's a wall mount that I didn't build "desktop" feet for so it sat on my office couch for a while during the build process. Here is a final leak test. Later on first boot found the GPU was defective and had to wait a few weeks to receive it back after an RMA.



Here is a picture of the "front" I/O. This was a pain to cut out and I wish I had planned it out more and CNC'd all the holes. But I had to learn the hard way and every hole in this case is routed out by hand because i thought it would be easier this way. HA!



And finally, the finished product!



With the PC and RGB on.



The wings are both etched on the backside with a jewelry sand blaster (think airbrush that shoots baking soda instead of paint) and lit from the edge under the aluminum embellishments. Then the top wing got a couple layers of tinted clear coat. The bottom wing was covered on the whole backside with a white vinyl, then I used pearl mid-coat on the front to almost hide the etching. The effect turned out better than I could have imagined! I will be making a video on how to do this, but not sure how soon.

The final specs:

ASUS ROG X470-F Gaming MoBo
Ryzen 7 3700X
MSI RTX 2080 Seahawk EK X
500GB WD SN750 NVMe boot drive
2 x 2TB WD Black HDD in Raid- 0
Silverstone 800 watt SFX PSU
HardwareLabs 420 Radiator
Misc. water cooling parts (EK, Alphacool, Bitspower, Thermaltake)

 

Fantastic results. The paint work is awesome.
Thanks for sharing, and welcome to Bit-Tech.
-Free paint and plastic? I missed my true calling.

 

Thanks! A lot of great work on this forum! Excited to be a part of it!

For the most part. Lol. It would have taken a lot longer if I hadn't had access to the shop. Took me about 6 months of staying after here and there.