LotusBlossom

[amberella]

New dragon? Gotta make the body all 3-d stencil-looking woven around the box there.

[amberella]

Did some more work on the dragon - working on creating the right positive/negative space so that the stencil won't fall apart. That's so anti-climactic.

goodnight.

amberella ::

[amberella]

I finished as much as I could with the box taped together, then I had to cut it open and lay it flat to finish. I think I'm ready to start cutting out some stencils! Plus - hopefully I finally figured out how to make my pics small and clickable to the larger image within the forum's posting structure. Yeah, I'm kinda slow sometimes.

amberella ::

[D1337]

pretty nice sketch.
on the wood it looked like a weak little snake lol.

[jdbnsn]

Wow! Very impressive, this will look fantastic!

[amberella]

on the wood it looked like a weak little snake lol.

my thoughts exactly - though i was leaning towards "worm." it was late, i was being lazy.

Today I cut the last of the wood pieces I needed. This was not and easy task. First of all, I forgot to add in the extra horizontal distance of the screw heads holding in the drives since the case was empty when I measured. So I cut everything, went to mock it up ... and there were gaps. So I re-measured and re-cut. What's that saying? "Measure once-ish, cut three or four times?" At any rate, now it's fine.

Second of all, and more importantly for anyone considering doing a case mod with one of these "one-piece" clear acrylic cases - THEY ARE NOT SQUARE!!! They're **close** to square - but they ARE NOT. So add in the fact that the thing is so small I can hardly get the pieces in place even with the thing empty, and it turns out that making a square box inside one of these cases is somewhat akin to creating a 3-d model of an escher print. This blows.

But nevertheless, I am pushing forwards and have "fudged" the square shape to a reasonable degree that I don't think it will be noticeable in the finished product. Of course, no one would notice if it weren't for the fact that THE WHOLE DAMN THING IS CLEAR!!!

Ugh - just a little frustrated tonight, apparently. But the pieces are white and once i finish fixing the sketch so that it matches the new dimensions, I can start on the stencils. Some pics:

My very high-tech painting layout:

Perhaps even more ghetto, but it works (and don't worry - all the possible holes are covered):

My assistant:

Peace out.

amberella ::

[Quakken]

Not freakin square.

Do you have any idea how nut-crunchingly hard it is to get an all acrylic case square?

especially when the only tools available to you are a dremel and a belt sander?

Of course, they have no excuse if they have actual tools. Like, if they have a
table saw at place-that-your-case-was-made, then they have no excuse. They just suck.

They just suck it dry.

[amberella]

Of course, they have no excuse if they have actual tools. Like, if they have a table saw at place-that-your-case-was-made, then they have no excuse. They just suck. .

This is my point exactly. I would have made the whole damn thing myself, but I thought I would eliminate a lot of errors by letting the "professionals" do it at the cost of it not having the exact specs that I wanted. I mean, most of the case is fine - and if I was just screwing crap into it, I probably wouldn't have even noticed. But that's not their market, and they should know that people who want those cases want right angles. Not to mention that the screw holes for the motherboard are also slightly off. I mean, if the board was flush with the side of the case and there weren't little spacers to hold the board off the wall, the holes wouldn't match up.

BTW - "they" is ClearPC

I know there have been a lot of reviews of this case and I was going out on a limb with it. It has pretty rounded corners you wouldn't get in a flat-lack acrylic case, but not much flexibility. Yet, none of the reviews mentioned this inexactness. Heck, I had to enlarge the front installation holes for the indicator LEDs that THEY provide with the case!

Anyway - I have to teach my Saturday yoga class now. Good stuff, since I clearly need to chill out. Om.

amberella ::

[amberella]

I am working more on my stencils today, and I've decided to change my approach a little from my initial concept. At first, I thought that I would be replicating the same lotus more than once around the case, and therefore the stencil's main goal was to provide the replication of the same pattern. Now that I've changed the design, however, each stencil will really only be used once and it's more of a style choice (and because when I started the project this uv paint was only available as spraypaint - now they have brush on, too). Instead, I've decided to use the stencils to get all my straight lines, but I'm also going to focus on the blending of the colors.

During testing, I realized that when the purple and green crossed each other, I got a white color. Now - I'm not sure if this is due to the pigmentation (where purple and green would normally make brown) or the chromatics of the spectrum (where neon UV colors seem like they should bend some amber/magenta/green rules) ... but it's white in practice, so I'm going with it. What I've done is cut some of the areas on the main (green) stencil over where they would contain both green and purple coloring, with the intention of taping over the area that would contain the color I'm not spraying. This should give me a "fuzz" effect that will blend the colors when I switch the tape. The secondary stencil has holes only where the entire area would be purple. I'm not sure if I'm explaining this well, but hopefully you'll see later.

This is the first stencil, scored, not entirely cut out yet:

Stencil A (Green color & some purple shading):

Stencil B (Purple Only):

Stencils on top of each other:

amberella

[DaveW]

This is cool. + Rep for showing us your methods...no matter now ghetto :p

-Dave