Project - Air Cube v2

[DavyBoy]

Really nice job you've done here mate, I like those grill bits you cut out for the fans, that must have been an absolute PITA to do all that with a dremel?

I find cutting simple holes for routing cables really difficult to do properly, there is no way in hell I'd manage to cut something out like you've done here!

 

[~>Dg<~]

nice one is it noisey ?

 

[waynio]

Thanks booyaka

DavyBoy majority of it is done with dremel, about an hour on each grill, then a little filing and then sanded the entire face of the panel to take any rough bits that stick out off, then cleaned with warm water and a soft sponge.
This is what it looked like after a rinse of water.

Got it cleaner afterwards, then dried, then painted.

Knowing the tips in these videos is a great start, then it's all practice and getting used to the handling using a dremel, but I find 1.5mm thick or less to be best for doing detailed cuts, thicker material would probably be best sent to a water jet cutter or laser.
Heres the video tutorials.
Dremel Techniques For Case Modding, Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/user/MonsterMawd#p/search/6/9iMiH8wYTDY

Dremel Techniques For Case Modding, Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/user/MonsterMawd#p/search/8/gTDpxmGEC58

Dg, it has increased the noise but not too much compared to a plain hole, probably added another 5db but it looks better than just a hole so can bare with it hehe , and if it does get to a point where it does my head in I could do a volt mod on the fans so they run a bit slower .

 

[waynio]

Dg, it has increased the noise but not too much compared to a plain hole, probably added another 5db but it looks better than just a hole so can bare with it hehe , and if it does get to a point where it does my head in I could do a volt mod on the fans so they run a bit slower .

Tried tollerating the noise difference for a couple of hours and didn't like it much , too used to it being nice & quiet, so I went & dug out my old zalman zm mfc1 + fan controller and hooked all the front panel & side fans to it & lowered the speed a little and it's now the same noise as it were with plain circles while keeping a good flow of air going through, was considering doing volt mods but figured it be easier and cleaner just to use a fan controller, it's hidden inside the case and can catch some air flow so it shouldn't overheat and fail. Side effect of this is temps have gone up by 3c but thats not too bad.

The spiral type grills are more restrictive than the ones in the middle so I can run the middle ones a bit faster than the spiral ones and noise stays the same so it's worked out good .

 

[waynio]

Definately last pictures now because I fixed the top and to show the fan controller.

 

[waynio]

I bought some 10mm spacers and rubber washers to put between the front panel & fans so I could put the fan controller back in the box of parts and it really helped cut the extra noise from the air restriction , so back to decent temps and normal noise .

 

[Sildeh]

It looks awesome, loving that colour

 

[waynio]

Thank you Sildeh .

Finally got around to buying an airbrush kit & basic colours so I can mix to get the colour I want, time to get heaps of practice in over the coming months , cheapo stuff until I get ok at it, then I'll consider getting a good airbrush.

After reading through Antony's How To Take Better Photographs Of Your Mod article on bit-tech, and after seeing how much better some mods are photographed I took the plunge and got an ok camera .
Because I was quite impressed with my dads new cheapo kodak camera, I decided to buy a higher model, a kodak z950 £140 cheapest I could find it in uk and it turned out the place I bought it from imports them so have been waiting since 17-feb & got it the other day, it is far superior to the olympus hand me down I used throughout air cube v2 .
Had a good mess about with the different manual settings, plenty of controls, taken some pictures all indoors with bad lighting on a tripod, I wanted to see if noise levels were good or bad in dimly lit places, I'm very happy with darkness in the pictures simply can't afford to jump into quality dslr land so this camera will do very nicely .
Anything I make in the future will be much better photographed, I'm going to make a nice big soft light box on the cheap & use a lamp or 2 with daylight bulbs & have a rotational platform to catch all angles.

I have to say though the compression when pictures get resized for forums on picture hosting sites lose a fair bit of detail.

First mini project for the airbrush is to paint the fans, but not before I play some more heavy rain .
Completed it with all positive outcomes, best & most unique game I have played in a while, I hear you can really change the outcomes from all actions made through the game so I'll play through this many times .

I'm having a possibly silly idea of making a big gaming stack system to hold my supercooled xbox 360 with a real psu instead of power brick, then the ps3 cooled from underneath whenever needed during long gaming sessions, and my pc on the top, these are rough sketchups without panels, just the frames.

 

[han_solo]

Dude, just want to say just how much 'respeck' you have earned from me! Other than your considerable skills you've demonstrated while doing this build I really admire your dizzying levels of motivation and energy... just wow!

Keep up the good work dude! Absolutely fantastic stuff!

 

[Tiamat21]

Ohh I like that pick ^
Well 7months later man and your nearly done <3
gratz.

 

[waynio]

Thank you han_solo & Tiamat21.

Got some new motivation to get a couple of things right .

I got it in a usable state in august 09, then just used it until february, did a couple of days on it to get the front panel how I wanted & was almost going to just carry on using it as is, but decided to perfect this case as it might be getting featured in a magazine pretty soon & pro photographed so that motivated me to fix a couple of cosmetic flaws.

Things to do over this week.

Paint the fans tomorrow or the day after.

Found a local aluminium stockist so I don't have to worry about delivery costs any more .

New angle bars to re-do the main corners because of a cosmetic build error which leaves a small hole on both bottom corners on the right panel.

A square solid bar for re-doing the feet with a polished finish.

A new back panel with the same grade of aluminium as the flat bars that is great for polishing also I want to flip the psu so the fan faces the exterior so it can take new air in & add an exhaust fan in the middle for hdd heat, which means I'll have to do the mesh again & some polishing & a new lick of paint but should be well worth doing, could confidently have pictures taken from any angle then.

 

[waynio]

Air cube part 2

Can't really call this a new project, more of a part 2 , I wanted a nice new unit for my consoles, pc & favourite games/dvds to be all in 1 space saving stack, had quite a few redesigns & settled for this one, seems my modding has overspilled into making furniture .

It's going to be a stand for the air cube on top, ps3 level below with great ventilation, a level below for my xbox 360, dvd storage below on the bottom 2 levels on both sides with a psu sat in the middle of level 2 for powering the xbox 360 & fans with room for control pads inbetween the dvds.

I'm also working on a new top & rear panel for the xbox 360 to accommodate for better cooling replacing the gpu heatsink for a 360 cpu heatsink & placing bga coolers on all chips with 120mm fan intake & exhaust & dvd drive relocation .

 

[waynio]

This aluminium was for redoing the corners & bottom sides & back panel.

When doing my design over & over I figured I dont have to re do the corners & bottom sides but I still have good use for the sheet to reorientate the back panel a little, so the angle bars in this picture are not needed for the build, had a slight redesign after I made the order.
Here is the right side panel botch shots, they will be covered by the chunky angle bars that hold the air cube in place, this mod has spawned from the botched corners & price of delivery not being worth just doing the air cube.

This is the aluminium for the new build, I beleive if the frame is good & strong then there is no true need for expensive thick sheet, especially for what I'm making.

I was sat on this aluminium for over a week which is a 1st, I usually can't wait but I wanted to do this properly, I needed a tool for doing clean bar cuts at 45 degrees & 90 degrees.
Missed out on a bargain for a really good cut off saw at £100 it was worth £300 but because of very low money I had to get a much cheaper alternative, a manual cheapish £30 mitre saw, the build would have gone tragically wrong if I didn't .

Should have been 1 of the 1st tools I added to my collection when working with aluminium bars, it's proven to be a very awesome tool for this build .

Finally the work begins woo hoo .

Friday
Got the angle bars for all levels cut to size, all 45 degree cuts.

Saturday
Got loads more cut to size, not much more to do other than a few more bars (but the thicker ones) & 6 thin sheets.

This is 1 of the basic levels

Got all bars cut to size today except for the main corner angle bars, want to get everything correct before I do them, so I'm just working on making the levels 1st.

Did a loose fit of all the levels & they are great, the bottom panel will be ultra strong, it looked pretty reasonable in google sketchup but in reality it does look a bit overkill, nonetheless it will be very strong indeed lol .

More updates soon

 

[crisbduck]

Very impressed by all this, well done!

 

[Jimmy23]

very nice ill attempt to make my own one day

 

[Gundog48]

I have considered building my own before then I considered "how the hell am I going to make PCI slots, drill the holes for mounting stuff in the right place etc"

I will love to see how you get this done! I have heard buying a motherboard tray is popular!

 

[Straz]

This is amazing, all of it!

 

[waynio]

, Yeah I think doing a good pci back piece is the trickiest piece to fabricate, buying a motherboard tray is best option or use 1 from a previous case, I used 1 from my last lian-li case so it's a gooden .
With a quality pan folder it would be pretty easy, but they cost too much for a modding hobby, good cnc machines cost too much for a modding hobby lol, was able to do the motherboard tray though.
I placed the pci back piece on the edge, marked it & used a motherboard as a template for the mounting holes, there is a special drill bit that is just pointy that heats up sheet metal causing it to dip whilst making a hole & then it's good for being tapped, not got one of those so flat square nuts on the other side helped with that.
It's in the log on this page.
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18029052&page=2

I have seen many simple but awesome cases made, 1 that comes to mind was made entirely with little square wooden cubes as an 8bit theme, check it out, very cool .
http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22059

I took a little break from doing the stand to get the back panel of the air cube done, was going good until I tried doing the mesh part, I done my sums wrong, should have been 10mm spacing but I did 7mm, would have been ok if I used a smaller drill bit, worked out too close together creating a bad mess, so had to come up with something else, I'll hopefully have that finished & cleaned up tomorrow, if not I'll put that part on hold & get back to making the stand.
My dremel has become useless, so can only use the air rotary tool now, it's miles better but noisy as hell so I only use that late morning til afternoonish, don't want my modding to annoy any neighbors

Thanks for comments all .

 

[waynio]

Oh no's, done the spacing wrong by 3mm for the mesh, should have been every 9 or 10mm, should have stopped after the 1st hole & remade the grid to follow, but no I ended up with this & thinking I'd have to buy another sheet.

My dremel has been dying slowly lately & has now become useless, it was getting lateish so couldn't use the air dremel (very noisy) so I made a quick alternative for the design & drilled within the areas I wanted cutting out & done a ton of filing, even used a hacksaw blade pushing & pulling through the area to get it done lol, was thinking it's just too rough looking but carried on anyway, it could still use a little more smoothing out here & there but I think it's turned out not so bad, what do you all think?.

 

[waynio]

This update covers the last few days.

With my dremel being useless now & the reinforced cutting discs having the wrong sized hole 1/8" making it a hassle to change discs because they also need aligning, I tried this other cutting air tool but couldn't see where I was cutting so put it away, this picture shows the new right side window & grill for the psu & also the 3mm higher motherboard tray, the flat bars are a temporary loose fix at the moment, they will be attached properly when it's time.

This shows the washers & 10mm spacers I used to cut down the noise from the restrictive front grills, I realised I only mentioned it in the log so heres a picture .

I can get to work on a few other things while waiting for stuff to come, the new cooling & top & back for the xbox 360, the ps3 stand, paint the fans, trim the back panel & smooth out any rough spots & get it painted, so no excuse for not getting something done while I wait .

Getting the feet off the air cube might be tough because I used araldite which sets like stone, it was the feet that introduced a little wonkyness to the case, seems it's sat correct on the right side & not on the left which is why there was a gap on the top left, can picture myself having to hammer & chissel them off so I can tap a solid bar for a good fit to existing bolts coming through the bottom.

I decided to do the xbox today, made a good bit of progress, spent near 12 hours on it, figured I'd keep the gpu heatsink so it will be about 130mm at it's highest point, got the basic functionality sorted on it, just need to make a nice cover for it all then the xbox is ready for painting, got the tap & tap wrench & it works a treat, used it for the rear fan mount, holds it nice & firm , this was a rrod xbox I bought & fixed it had a 0020 error code & figured the only way it will stay fixed is if I boost the cooling, all of the long screws still have their place but I'm thinking of loosing the middle back one so I can create a duct for the rear fan, as you can see it's half in & half out. Ha, it just dawned on me while looking at the picture that I'll probably have to make a new hold down strip else it might not close, doh! .