Project - Air Cube v2

It looks ok from the angle I shot the pics at, other angles don't look so good, well they do but nowhere near perfect anyway :).

The paint in some areas is a little bitty and rough and for the clear I have used just over a can and half, I hope it looks ok when it has dried and cured a bit, really I should have put more work in to getting it smooth, kind of rushed it a bit like usual, but I'll accept the finish anyway, think I should get someone else to do the paint job in my future mods, I lack the patience and expertise and quality paint and air brush and spray gun for painting, I'm just not all that good at finishing my mods it seems, just must be getting too excited to set it up lol :D.
 
I was like that when i sprayed and put a window on my Antec 300, i rushed it a little and ended up making some silly mistakes.

I've just recieved my new Antec 300 and im planning on doing some mods to it soon, when i get the time.
 
waynio said:
It looks ok from the angle I shot the pics at, other angles don't look so good, well they do but nowhere near perfect anyway :).

The paint in some areas is a little bitty and rough and for the clear I have used just over a can and half, I hope it looks ok when it has dried and cured a bit, really I should have put more work in to getting it smooth, kind of rushed it a bit like usual, but I'll accept the finish anyway, think I should get someone else to do the paint job in my future mods, I lack the patience and expertise and quality paint and air brush and spray gun for painting, I'm just not all that good at finishing my mods it seems, just must be getting too excited to set it up lol :D.
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yes, i know exactly 100% how you feel and exactly what your paint job looks like too.... been there, done it and worn the tee shirt !

i would stop right now....do not spoil your case, because you've done a hell of a lot of good work already........because you will not be able to hide the faults under 4 coats of lacquer!

strip it all off and start again, use paint stripper, do not ever use aerosol cans again, wait; be patient, you're in no mad rush and get yourself an Airbrush...it'll only cost 20 to 30 quid.............do not spray your case straight away.... practice first and get used to it

getting a great finish with aerosol cans is very hard....the Airbrush is miles easier, you cant compare the two, Aerosol cans are total crap in comparison ( they spit, kick out far too much watery paint and god damned hard to control) .... the paint from an Airbrush goes on like a fine mist..... you'd have to be spraying like a total loony to get paint runs, because it goes on so beautifully.

dont get a pro to do it... learn how to use an airbrush............... start again!


http://www.artifolk.co.uk/images/products/3299x300.jpg

dont get a very fancy airbrush.... too delicate/ hard to clean and wont hold enough paint...get a cheapo like above, dont get a compressor ( too expensive) use a spare car tyre/ foot pump, it'll keep you fit! :D:D

dont buy cans of air, they'll last about 10 mins....it'll cost you a fortune
 
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lol too late Mal X, I went running into it, oh well, car tyre foot pump keep you fit lmao, already got the compressor and is very adjustable, but seriously I was pretty eager to get things moving, and I could strip it down at a later date, with a fair bit of difficulty I know, but it can be done so an awesome finish is not for now, 1 thing is for sure thou I will not use aerosols ever again.

Todays update with pics.
I got up at 7am, the plan was to do the clear coat and then go back to bed, not been getting much sleep the past few days so very tired.

But it was a pretty nice day so I used virtually 2 cans of clear, let it dry for an hour then put the panels in the sun and enjoyed the nice weather :).

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I decided to build it back up at about 5pm and managed to get some shots of it in the sun, the polished bits will be cleaned up a bit for the final pics and I bought a touch up pen/brush thing which has primer, colour and clear of the same colour so I can colour the ends which are bare :).

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I think it looks quite nice, far from perfect I know but and I'm happy with how it turned out, other than the 2 or 3 oversprays I did and the lack of all round smoothness with the paint job.
 
Thanks moppy89 tonight in a mo I'm adding loc tight to most of the bolts so they stay in place well, then putting the switches, fans, mesh, light and window in and I'll be installing the pc bits tomorrow, so should be then :).
 
Yeah, I think given the effort you have put into this you really should bite the bullet and have it powdercoated. I know it'll cost a little more, but the finish will be superb and long lasting.
 
It actually looks a lot better now the clear has cured more :).

Much more space than I thought, which means I could get a sata card and add at least 4 more hdd (if I needed lol), I'm going to get a sata card so I can ditch the ide dvd's I hate the bulky ide cable, it is annoying how this gigabyte p45-dq6 motherboard has 4 extra sata ports but can't be used for normal single drives.

The cable stash area is great, it is holding all the fan wires and the cathode inverter.

The ac ryan quad fan connectors are good but the leds on them always burn out straight away and give off a puff of smoke so I cut all the leds off :).

The silver lamptron switches there was a problem, the ring light one was fine but the dot one sounded awful when pressed and seemed faulty, so luckily I was originally going to put black switches with blue ring and blue dot so I put them in to replace them and to be honest they look much better :).

When I assembled the pc my sound card disapeared and would not pick up in device manager so I uninstalled the drivers and put it in the next pci slot and put the latest drivers on it and is fine now :).

I have ordered a skythe dual ssd 2.5 to 3.5 mounter and will give me the time to prepare my pc for it.

Also I thought I would see if there are any vibrations without thick accoustic foam, and there is no need for it, no vibes :).

On with the up and running pics.

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Also I think I'm going to need to upgrade photobucket to pro for a short while the bandwidth is being chomped up fast, yesterday I had 3gb left out of 10gb, today 2gb :eek: lol.
 
Thanks Xappy, I'm condsidering painting my desk next because last time I cleaned it the paint was starting to strip, got it from ikea, it is well built but the paint is weak, and I'm either going to quit smoking or not smoke in my room or at least not at the desk, even thou the ash goes in the tray it some how builds up all over the desk so gets pretty filthy, need to get used to other slight habbit changes before going for the quitting smoking :D.
 
Thanks everyone who commented and kept me motivated, appreciated :).

I went and bought another OCZ 60gb summit to put in raid0, here is the bench I run earlier, Awesome performance, I'm amazed how much my pc was being held back, Used to get 50MB/S up to 100MB/S with normal hdd's, everything seems instant now.
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And because I have had to let 2 500GB hdd's go to make room for the ssd's which take up the space of 1 hdd and with the extra height because of not needing the acoustic foam I could re design the front panel to be flat, the extension was purely done so it could hold 2 hdd cages and full size optical drives.
 
The apaches kick a very good air flow, best fans I have used so far and have tried many, with 7 of them thou They are not 16db I would say around 25db, but then again the pc is only half a meter away from me when I'm using it, but is not the slightest bit annoying either, just as quiet as my mums Lian-Li PC-60A PLUS which is nice and quiet, I would say the majority of the noise is coming from my enermax galaxy with its 80mm fan on the back of it so need to get a quiet psu, either an enermax revolution or a Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro, I'll save that for when Good dx11 gpu's are out thou, I'm broke because of the ssd's lol, definately worth it thou :).

I doubt I'll cross over to an i7 rig now, think I'll wait for the next big change, not enough of an improvement or change from my current rig to justify the cost.

Here are the idle and load temps, I'm using OCZ Freeze Extreme Thermal Conductivity Compound after years of using Arctic Silver 5 I thought I'd give it a try, did not look up the application instructions so it turns out I have put far too much on and spread it to cover the cpu, I will reapply it today and post an updated temps pic.
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I reapplied the paste as instructions say "just a rice sized blob like arctic silver and do not spread" and reseated the heatsink, same results so was fine as it were lol.
 
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