Project: Pandora's Box

[RogueOpportunist]

Actually along with my projects new direction I've also been rethinking my cooling options, to coincide with the Pandora's Box theme, the plan is to turn the case sideways making it look like an ornate chest or "box" and cooling with a single 100cfm 240mm fan on the top right over the motherboard with the sides being grilled/vented in some way with the front and back being sealed so airflow on the right side of the case gets pushed out through the power supply and hard drive cage while air on the right side gets pushed out over the video card and chipset heatsinks.

I have an old shuttle matx mobo and athlon 3000+ that both run really hot so once I get the basic chassis sized and put back together I'm going to load it up and use tin foil to wall off the various sides to see what kind of effect it has on the temperatures, having a top down system seems like it would work well with a top down CPU cooler like the stock intel but after market coolers that blow front to back might suffer... To compensate for a large after market cooler I may create a ducted system that passes air from the front to the back through the cpu heatsink and use the top down to cool the rest of the system.

So far the idea I'm most fond of looks like this...

I know it forces the airflow against the natural direction of the heat but I don't really see that being a problem and although an argument could be made for air pushed out the sides being sucked in again at the top I can't really see that as being an issue either, if the air is still hot enough to create a problem by the time is circles around then the bigger problem would be the ambient temperature in the room, I could always switch the air flow to blow hot air out the top and suck in from the sides but sucking in through the top means I have have 1 big easily washable dust filter whereas with any "blow hole" system there is no way I could direct dust through a single intake source... unless I went around sealing every single crack with silicon.

I'm also thinking I can squeeze in 8 drives if I went with 2.5"... Not sure on that one though, 3.5" drives still have the size and cost per gb advantage and the sizes available on 3.5" drives pretty much negate any size gained from having double the amount of 2.5" drives.

[RogueOpportunist]

So I finally got around to making some cuts, decided to leave it for a weekday when people are at work as to not bother everyone around me with the noise.

I opted not to use the jigsaw as I had this strange feeling that the up and down cutting motion on sheet metal like this would tear the edge to rat **** so I just dremel'd my way through it, which didn't actually turn out half bad... Well no worse than the jigsaw would have been I'm sure, here's the cut top and bottom pieces...

The first cut I made was a little wobbly at the start and they are still rough but after grinding them flat it should all turn out pretty straight... Now to figure out the best way to attach them to each other, I'm thinking if I'm going mesh anyways I could cut out the center then use 2 part epoxy to attach the 2 pieces together then epoxy the mesh on the back which should take care of the structural strength, I'm open to any other ideas people might have though.

To get a better idea of the space I'm working with I taped the case back together temporarily to load it up with some parts...

The scrap metal you see poking out the 5.25" drive back was just to lift the hard drive high enough to get over the ram, I've had to change the idea of mounting the hard drives width way in the case due to my complete overlooking of the cables that come out of the power supply, no big deal though, also, in the final product the drive isn't going to be sitting practically on top of the CPU/Ram like it is, I just wanted it as far back as possible for some perspective in the picture.

As I mentioned previously the 240mm fan will be sitting directly over top of the motherboard so I can't see cooling being any kind of a problem, the only issue I might have to deal with is the 3.5" drives sticking out into the area the fan will be mounted... Hmm... Maybe I'll just make a bracket for 2 2.5" drives instead.

The PSU in the picture above isn't the one I plan on using so while the right side looks pretty cramped for airflow the PSU that is really going in here does have a fan to pull air through. The power supply I used was the cheapo that came with the case, I'm figuring it's about standard depth for a lower wattage PSU but just to compare I dropped my 950w in to see how much space I would lose since the 950 isn't in a case yet...

Obviously the components I plan on using in this case are not going to require anything even remotely close to 950 watts of power but it's nice to see that I could still fit a larger power supply if I really wanted to.

Oh and my maximum card length inside the case turned out to be exactly 10.5"... My 10" 9800 GTX+ is going to fit perfectly.

[RogueOpportunist]

Been awhile since any updates, not really much to say, some parts and things I've ordered are in limbo and I don't want to do anything permanent to the case until I can physically see what I'm working with so... yeah... shoulda just gone to Home Depot. The project does live on though.

[RogueOpportunist]

Small little update, got some of the "hardware-esque" stuff finally but the computer components I ordered from NCIX STILL haven't arrived, I dunno if anyone has dealt with these guys before but my god are they incompetent, apparently their policy is if your order doesn't ship right away and everything doesn't go perfectly on the first try they just leave it there until you call, then when you call they tell you everything is good then leave it there until you call again, been almost a month now I've been trying to get these guys to ship my order... Makes me wanna mod their face into a computer case with my fist...

Anywhoo... these things happen I guess, it's just thrown a major wrench into the works because part of my plan in building this system was doing a small upgrade on my main system (and switching back to the ATX form factor) while using the leftover parts to make the second system which will be going into this case so I want to make sure my measurements (since the space in the case is going to be so tight) are done with the actual components that I'm going to be using but doing that at this point would mean having to take a part my primary system and I just can't afford the downtime... Ugh...

I guess I should think positive and hope the bulk of my frustrations are getting themselves out of the way early and it will be smooth sailing after this... I know I'm probably kidding myself but hey... Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

[x88x]

Bad luck on the parts, where did you order them from?

[RogueOpportunist]

NCIX.com, it's a Canadian company. I usually order from TigerDirect.ca but they didn't have everything I wanted and I like ordering as much as I can from the same place as shipping adds up when you start piecing things from multiple locations.

At first I ordered a couple open box items that they didn't have and they never bothered to email me or say anything about it until I called them a week later asking what's going on, then I changed the order for the full price versions of which they had tons of stock of and sent in the difference via paypal and they again did nothing with it for a week until I called them, then their paypal department apparently processed the order and again nothing happened until I called them, then I waited more and nothing happened, calling them yet again the guy assured me it would be sent out asap and he was "bumping it up in the queue", that was noon on Wednesday, they had 2 days to ship and nothing has happened... Guess this is what I get for being a patient and reasonable customer... Come Monday I'm thinking it's time to act like a raving lunatic.

I probably don't need to make it into a little story in my worklog but I guess this is all part of the project right?

[x88x]

Doh, sorry, missed the name in your earlier post. Is there a Better Business Bureau sorta thing in Canada that you could report them too?

I probably don't need to make it into a little story in my worklog but I guess this is all part of the project right?

Yup, all part of the experience. Plus, we've got quite a few Canadian members; it's good to let them know of problems with a potential supplier.

[RogueOpportunist]

Reporting someone to some agency that does next to nothing would cause me more trouble than it would them, I finally ended up getting my parts after like a month or so, heh... Normally they're a pretty good company to deal with but this order just kept slipping through the cracks for some reason... ah well, that's life.


Finally got some time to do some more work but I am going to have to retake some of the shots, bought myself a new little camera and I'm still getting used to it so I buggered some of the other pictures I took, not a big deal though as the ones for the top turned out O.K.

I haven't had much of a chance to get into the workshop to work on the project but I did spend a lot of time mulling over the layout inside the case and I came to the conclusion that making into more of a mini-desktop style case just wouldn't work out too well... I mean, no more than just designing it to be a tower then just flipping it onto its side should I need to so I've gone back to laying it out to be a "tower".

Here's a shot of the top of the case...

I cut out a hole in the top that will be meshed and have the hard drives "dangling" underneath so the heat will rise directly out of the case, I clamped the two cut pieces down to a little piece of wood with that blue cloth like paper towel stuff so when it comes time to pull it up after the J-B weld has dried the inevitable stuck bits will just be stuck to the cloth and can be sanded off.

On a side note the "flex" that I talked about earlier for the top piece seems to be gone now that I cut/refastened it... Cool beans.

Things are getting to be a little tricky now as every piece is cut in half so making sure everything lines up properly and keeps to the measurements is becoming a concern, after all, I don't really want this looking like some 6th graders birdhouse once it's all back together.

Here's a closeup of the J-B Weld on the seam...

I've never actually used J-B Weld before but I see tons of other case modders using the black/red J-B Weld so figured it must be the thing to use, we'll see how it goes. I'm trying to make sure I do things "properly" but to be perfectly honest I really have no idea what I'm doing and am just flying by the seat of my pants.

Unfortunately as I mentioned earlier I messed up the other pictures but for the most part all the pieces are being "glued", this part is just taking a little time though as I only have 4 clamps and the J-B weld takes something like 4 hours to cure and 24 to dry.

On another note this past month or so has been a nightmare for my computers, I've had to reformat my 2 desktops multiple times and had the SSD in my main desktop start corrupting data, luckily Patriot gives a 2 year warranty and those 2 years run out in January... Nice timing for the drive to kick the bucket so I'm almost happy it failed now as opposed to later.

Everything seems to be running fine now though, it's just amazing how much time computer problems can suck up, hell it took me almost 2 weeks just to figure out my SSD was failing, I thought it was like 10 other things before finally narrowing it down.

I'm hoping to get a fair bit of this done before Christmas, at the very least I want to have the frame back together, the hard drive cage made and get prepped for some of the more "creative" work so this worklog gets a little more interesting than just pictures of metal... Although at this rate I might want to rename the project "Dead before done" due to the world ending in 2012 and stuff...

[RogueOpportunist]

Interesting day today, it seems like I didn't get much done but what little I did get done took me a few hours as today was a sanding day and I did most of it by hand as I wasn't sure how the J-B Weld would hold... Oh and I decided to skip retaking the pictures I goofed yesterday as I wanted to jump right into things.

Yesterday when I was getting the pieces put together I realized that nothing was "straight" or "flat" or "symmetrical"... I guess that's to be expected and normally it wouldn't be a big deal... except for when you start taking pieces out of the middle and then trying to smack em back together.

My first little quirk was right on the edges of the base of the case, one side lined up perfectly but looking at the other side it seemed like it was a millimetre "off", I did my best to fix it with the Dremel sander and think I did O.K. below are the sides, can you tell which side was off?

I figured out a little trick while sanding with the Dremel, if you have 2 sections that aren't "level" you can sand it out by using the rotary motion of the tool "upward" against the hard edge of the section that is higher... Probably easier if I include a little illustration...

This isn't likely going to be any big secret to those with experience but by making sure the rotary action of the sanding bit is going against the edge sticking up you can at least smooth out hard edges... It still won't be perfect but at least you won't have an obvious seam to deal with after painting.

Another little quirk I ran into was that the ornate decoration on the bottom of the case; like the edges, didn't line up perfectly. At first I thought I goofed when fastening the pieces together but realized it wasn't me, the metal just wasn't symmetrical... So I had a little touching up to do on that as well...

Looking over at the sanding bit I used to smooth out the sides I was hoping it might work some magic once again...

Seems to have worked like a charm, the only problem I ran into was after all the sanding was done and everything was looking pretty smooth and lined up I accidentally put my hand down right smack in the centre of the base plate causing the thin seam of J-B Weld in the middle of the seam line to crack, fixing it wouldn't have been a big deal but after looking at it a bit more I decided I wanted a little more structural strength, unlike the top section which will be getting a mesh screen to help reinforce the areas with the cuts, the bottom is going to be on its own, so after all that sanding and detailing I decided to fill in the whole centre area of the ornate "grooves" with J-B Weld, not really sure how well this is going to work out but I'm hoping that along with some more structural strength having more density on the base might help with noise... *shrug*, we'll see.

Once the J-B is dry I'm hoping I can just block sand it flat without any trouble, I didn't put any "reinforcement" strips on the outside of the plate but I do plan to put some along the grooves on the inside which I also plan to cover up, I could have put a few scrap metal strips in the J-B on the outside too but at this point I'm not sure if this is even going to work like I want it to and it would be far easier to sand out the J-B Weld if it doesn't work than to try and sand out the J-B and try to pry off some metal strips.

Now to rummage through stuff to find something I can rip some metal meshing out of for the top...

[RogueOpportunist]

Seems like it was another one of those days where I spent all day working and got nothing done... I swear I dunno how some of you guys get your stuff done so fast.

I started the day with some sanding again, the centre part of the base plate that I filled in with J-B Weld was dry so I wanted to get it sanded to see how level it was, didn't turn out too bad, there's a few areas around the edges that "dip" a bit as you can see by the little un-sanded bits but I'm sure the primer coat will cover that up...

It still looks a little rough in this shot and I did a bit more sanding afterwards but soon realized there was one spot along the cut seam that was sticking up a bit so I did my best to round it off and then slapped a bit more J-B which I'll sand smooth tomorrow, the only part that kinda sucks is the raised section extends into both the lower and upper ornate deco thingy so making the edge of the deco thingy look "normal" while getting rid of any seams is going to be tricky.

Overall I was very pleased with how filling the space in the middle with J-B worked out, not only did it make it stronger but the piece has much more density to it now, even when using the dremel to sand the sound wasn't as harsh so the "concrete" pool in the centre of my base plate is definitely going to help muffle ambient chassis reverb.

As pleased as I was I decided to go ahead and do the underside, I didn't end up putting in the metal reinforcement strips though as I really didn't feel it was needed, the piece feels plenty strong enough as it is now...

It looks a little sloppier than it really is as the camera picks up a lot of detail in higher contrast but I basically just took a paint scraper and used it to apply the J-B in the crevice as smoothly as possible so I don't have as much sanding to do.

While I had everything goo'd up I decided to keep going with the J-B and give the top some of that noise dampening goodness so I did up the groove deco thing on the top too plus I did the little space under the lip... that part was a pain to get even remotely close to smooth and sanding it isn't going to be fun, I tried to use the same technique as I did with the paint scraper on the larger sections by using a flat edge exacto blade, it worked O.K. but in hind sight was a big pain in the butt and I probably should have skipped this idea...

The little lip thing alone cost me about 2 hours of screwing around to get it to look "flat", I probably spent more time on this than I should have considering it's the underside and once assembled likely never to be seen but if it didn't look "right" I wouldn't have to see it to know it was there and it would just bug the hell out of me...

The top looks like it will end up really smooth, will likely only need to sand it to get rid of the excess "slop" from smearing around the scraper, which suits me fine, the less sanding the better at this point.

Overall today; like yesterday, wasn't the most productive but my god does sanding and "puttying" things take time to do right. I don't know if I'm just some remedial handy man or what but I spent a good 2 hours sanding that one base plate so it was smooth, I was thinking of using my power sander but I have this feeling that if I do something is going to go wrong, either the piece will crack or too much will get sanded or god knows what else, sanding by hand sucks but at least I know it will give me the finish I'm after.

For the last picture of the day here's my little workspace...

I used a dollar store shower curtain pinned up against the wall and draped down over the workspace as it has a very strong static clingyness and a lot of the metal shavings/dust from sanding stick to it so cleanup is just a matter of wiping is down with a wet cloth, works pretty well.

Anywhoo that's it for today... Time to go eat.