Named after vault #13 in Fallout, that needed a water chip... Sorry, I couldn't come up with a cool name It actually has nothing to do with Fallout or vaults.. It had some relation to water though I'm open for name suggestions though. Right. This is my first post and my first real mod, so it's probably all going to go fubar on me I modded a suitcase about two years ago when casemodding was at its prime, when every mod was original. Didn't turn out the way I wanted it though, and I needed to expand. (Pics in this article is clickable (Warning: High-res pics)) I bought this case about 8 months ago. I wanted something black, clean and stylish. I didn't really fancy pre-modded stuff, but I didn't want one of the standard Chieftec/Antec black cases, so I went for this one. I like it alot, it's stealthed, got 3 tempratures sensors, has 10 levels of fan speed adjusting for 2 fans, and comes with a fancy display in the front. The front of the case. The blue thing on top is the power LED, which is an ultrabright, blue LED, behind some sort of shielding so it won't hurt your eyes or anything So what do I want to mod? Well, I've always wanted a window in my case, but I've never actually had one, on either of my cases. So that's basicly what I wanted to do. I go to college and study eletronics though, so I thought it would be cool to include a few electronic gadgets around the case if I could find any. I've decided I'm going to add a stereo VU meter to their respective sides of the case front. The right channel will have 10 leds on the right side of the front, near the top, and the left channel will have the same on the left side. I will also be placing the HDD activity meter from Bit-Tech somewhere on the front. I am yet to decide where. However, the main mod is going to be the window. I've been a big fan of Metku's mods, as he always have some nice ideas. I saw his article called "Bubbles" on his site a while ago, and I instantely thought it would be wicked if I could fit that as a window in my case. So that's what I'm going for Before anyone asks, yes, I am worried about having water in my PC, and I do realize there has to be an opening somewhere for the air to come out. I will also be tidying up the inside of my PC, as it is a friggin mess at the moment: The transparent/blue cable is an SATA cable that actually lights up blue, but the flash of my camera has removed the light from the pic. Not sure if I'm going to keep that cable there, as I have some UV-reactive rounded ATA cables that are going to be put to use once I get ahold of an UV cathode. Right o'. That's the intro, first part coming in a few mins when I've had time to write it up Any suggestions as to what I could do for more mods would be appreciated Oh, and hello everyone, nice to finaly have posted.. Been browsing the forums and site for ages, heh
22nd February 2004 I will start with the watertank, the rest will probably come when that is done. Looked around town for a cheap place to buy me some plexi, but these shops wasn't going to let me buy any, at least not cheap The ones that did sell cheap plexi only sold 20x30x3mm plates, which wasn't going to be big enough.. Or so I thought Going through my dads loft/attic ( sorry, I'm norwegian ), I found some 20x30x4 mm plates of plexi, that had these holes in them.. Don't know what they have been used for. Well, I decided I could use these. My case is a lot smaller than I thought it was Just going to fill up the holes with silicon to seal them. Sorry that this isen't really documented, I came up with the idea to post it here not long ago, so the pics I already had taken were just supposed to be showed to my friends. Anyway, the plates were too small to be bent in the right angles and still remain an acceptable size, so I cut up 4 peices of plexi that was going to be the top, bottom and the left and right side of the tank. For this task, I used an old Black & Decker compass saw (again, sorry, I'm norwegian ). This is the air pump I'm using right now.. Not sure if this is the one that will be used in the finaly version though, it's quite noisy and runs on AC :/ (Sorry for the blurry pic) Was a nice, sunny day outside the garage Right, thought I should check out what kind of effect I got by poking a hole in the air tube with a needle. So I taped the tube, and put tape over the actual tube where I was going to hole it. Just so I could see where I put the holes. And the holes have been made.. I tested it in a bowl of water, but I didn't take any pictures of the effect it made, stupid me Anyway, it was rougly the same effect as Metku did on his mod, without the lights though, obviously That's it for now, more in a bit. Why am I writing this is past tense? Well, as I said in the article, I only thought about writing the article just now..
23rd February 2004 Woke up today and thought I should get right on the modding. Made this nice little thing from peices of wood I had laying around. The 6 pins around the edges is to keep the distance between the plexi when I'm applying the silicon. I used this silicon to seal and glue the plexi together. It's made for glass and plexi, to be used in aquariums/fish tanks ( and once again, I'm norwegian, sorry ). Silicon applied. Tube fastened using silicon aswell (I'm starting to like this silicon stuff ) MMmmm... Chilli noodles, my favourite modding food Just waiting for the silicon to harden/dry, whatever it's called
23rd February 2004 @ 8 pm Right. Front side is siliconed together. Didn't get much done cause I had managed to get soap into the holes before I siliconed it together, so the hole was still a hole, so to say Ah well, cleaned it up, siliconed it up, and ready to test this mutha The tank holds 1.5 liters of water, that's about 0.39 gallons. Looking good, bubbles were a bit big, but I was rather satisfied with the overall look. HOWEVER... Crisis. You don't see it well in this picture, but the plexi actually kind of cracked on the edge, due to the silicon.. Somehow.. That's as far as I've gotten right now Going to go look for plexi tomorow. A big plate that I can bend instead of glue together. At least some parts of it. I will also be buying a bubble tube that they usually use in aquariums/fish tanks (again with the norwegian thing ), to get nice small bubbles. More pics and info tomorow. Comments and suggestions (how to do it and more, more MORE mod ideas ) are appreciated. Thanks for reading
Hi neighbour (or "nabo" ) in the west. Looks good so far. Don't let that little mistake pu you down. Good to see that you are on it again with a different method I like the bubbles Looks good there. Keep on modding
24th February 2004 (Once again, pics are clickable for bigger versions) Started the day by testing the strength of my destroyed plexi water tank thingy ;p The silicon was surprisingly strong. It will do just fine for keeping the tank sealed, as long as I don't skip a few millimeters or something. It hurts to see all that work gone to waste, but it was for the better. This time I will have a more secure tank Well, I went out looking for a big peice of plexi, so I could just bend it instead of trying to glue it all together with silicon. I ended up finding this pretty cheap material called polycarbonate. You've probably heard about it, but I'm new to this kind of stuff.. Bought two equally big peices, both large enough to make a water tank by themselves, if I added a plexi top and bottom. This way I didn't have to go buy another peice if I destroyed one of them "There has to be an easier way to bend this stuff than to try and do it myself by heating it up", I thought to myself while driving back home. I remembered buying a plate of copper from a place a while ago for another project, and he bent the stuff for me for free. So I decided to head down there and see if he would help me with bending this stuff. He was just about to leave when I showed up, but he told me he would do it, no problem So he bent the stuff for me after my dimensions (30mm x 200mm x 30mm x 200mm), and I ended up with two nicely bent peices of polycarbonate. Kind of an easy way out, but hey, "as long as I don't tell anyone", right? As you can see from the pic, the last fold didn't actually turn out quite 90° like it was supposed to.. More like 45° Blasted.. Had to get that down to 90°, or very close to it anyway. If I left the polycarbonate like it was now I was afraid it would have too much tention and burst open the silicon all to sudden, that wouldn't be a pretty sight in a PC Tried doing it the easy way, applying some pressure to it for some time. And off I went to see if I could find something that "produced" smaller bubbles than the holes I made in the tube.
24th February 2004 @ 3 PM Back from my shopping, found myself something I thought would do fine. (Click for bigger picture) A "bubble cascade" as it says. In other words a tube full of small holes everywhere. It cost me 109 kr, that's about £8.3, or $15.7. Then again, most things in Norway are really expensive. For me, this isen't really alot of money. It was far too long, but the girl in the store told me she "thought" it could be cut up in peices. Good enough for me Bubbles Kind of few bubbles here, but I didn't quite seal the lid on the end of the tube, so alot of air is pumped out there instead of the other holes. Right. The first attempt to bend the 45° down to 90° didn't quite work out, as a matter of fact, I don't think it did anything at all to the polycarbonate. Time for some more serious measures. Removed the protective layer and prepared to heat up the plastic with a hot air gun. This worked really well once I figured out the best way to do it. Heating one part up then moving on to the other part of the plastic didn't really work, I had to go back and forth with the heat gun and heat it up evenly. That really helped alot and I got it down close to 90°, as you can see in the next picture (even though I taped it to help keep it sealed for a while). I then put the tube in and used silicon to make sure it held its position. And now for the tricky part.. Silicon has been applied and tape used to hold it together while the silicon dries up. Just have to wait for the morning now so I can see if it's been sealed properly. When that is done, I can move on to putting the top and bottom on That's it for today. As usual, comments and suggestions are appreciated.
looks pretty sweet man. If the recent attempt doesn't work again, try getting some Weld-On to hold the stuff together, then Silicon to seal it (although, you MIGHT not need to silicon, better to be safe than sorry).
if your still open to suggestions, maybe you can do some kinda cool designed window on the top and get some glow commin outa that case... heh i like glow . just wanted to add my two cents to the project ^^. anyway nice lookin case, and your braver than me to make your own watercooling stuff... takes ballz have fun with it
Where is this tank going, as a window? That would be badass man. Just use some aluminum L brackets and you're set. There, I think that was 2 cents.
Well I'm sorry to let you down, and I probably should have made it all clearer.. This is just going to be a window, I'm still going to use air cooling.. For this project anyway :/ Well as I stated in the start of the article it was basicly just cause I needed a project name for the case and it was the first thing I though of.. It had to do with water Yeah, it's going in as the window I'll probably have to put the tank on the inside of the box though, as opposed to in the actual door.. It's quite wide, and I have to be able to empty and fill the tank with water when I'm going to LAN's. Any suggestions as to how I could mount it would be nice of course Ouch :/ What are the problems with it exactly? I haven't had any problems so far but then again I don't really have alot of power consuming parts.. Update coming in a bit, tank is nearly finished now
25th February 2004 Tested the strength of the sealed case and it felt alright. Going to apply some more silicon though just in case. The last thing I want is for this thing to explode and fill my case with water I cut the bubble cascade thing to fit the water tank and added some silicon to the end lid so hopefully it wont leak as much air as it did when I tested it. Used some silicon and my beloved masking tape to get this thing mounted to the tank. Didn't want it to float up when I added water to the tank Then added silicon to the bottom and put the plexi bottom on. It's a bit wider than the tank but that'll just make it more stable. Still haven't really thought of a good way to put this thing into my case, lol Sorry, really bad picture there. Then for the top. I needed 3 holes here. One for the air in from the pump, one for the air to go out (have to add a tube to that one to prevent humidity from spreading inside my case, and a hole for adding and removing water. The holes had to be relatively big so I had to use a drill instead of my beloved dremel Obviously, I suck at drilling. I used 3, yes, THREE, tries to get the holes done without destroying the top plexi peice. In the first attempt I managed to brake the plexi into two peices cause I applied too much pressure Second attempt got too close to the edge and broke off a relatively big peice Third try went just fine My two first tries Once again I pull out my silicon and apply it to the plexi. Turned out rather messy, but I'll probably hide it so you won't see all the mess through the window The tube coming from the tank is the air tube from the air pump, the little plastic thing behind it is for another tube to lead air out of the case (tube needed due to the humidity as stated earlier), and the third hole on the far side is for filling and emptying water. Closeup That's it for today. Tomorow will be used to test the tank and see if its been sealed properly. Will probably leave the pump on for a while too and see what the effect is like
