PROJECT: The Cube (101)

more space is always welcome in mods... trust me... option 1 i would say..

Go with option 1. There are always unseen issues while modding. Just make the panels slightly larger than they have to be. I always make everything a few mm bigger than I should, just to be safe.

Chapter 4:

I have decided to choose option 1 (as suggested) unfortunately I havn't made much progress past couple of days. However I have made a professional molex removal tool simply by removing the guts out of a crappy pen.

I then put some heatshrink over a sata power cable. Those sata power connectors are a b***h! Almost impossible to seperate without breaking the tiny little tabs on the side.

I tested the heatshrink on a couple of cables. One I heated with a heatgun, the other left as is. I actually like it better when I don't use heat on the heatshrink.

I think I'll wait til I have the case done before I work on tidying up the power supply cables.

I wanted to use black heatshrink and red connectors, only I can't find red sata power connectors so I might do it the other way around (red heatsrhink & black connectors) as I have a heap of red sata data cables.

oh nice idea :) this will look sweet

I tried the pen trick once but all the pens I had were to big lol. I gave in and got a $5 molex pin pusher, says it only works on male pins but you can get it to work on both.

Chapter 5:

I used one of the sides of the Antec case that I destroyed to cut out the bottom as it has a grill cut into it which will make a nice vent.

I also chopped down the Antec motherboard tray to fit into the case.

Both of these pieces seemed to be made of steel and I used the default blade that came with the jigsaw and I'll tell you now... I STRUGGLED!

I havn't finished with these pieces but I'm leaving them for now until I am 100% sure where I want everything to sit.

So I have moved onto drawing out and cutting the sides! I must say I was quite scared to do this as I struggled a lot so far to do 5 basic cuts!

This time I went out and bought some blades specifically for cutting aluminium. I am lucky I did as when I got back I noticed one of the teeth on the existing blade had broken off.

I procded to cut the sides. I'm not sure if it was the fact that I was now cutting aluminium and not steel or if it was the fact that I had the correct blade but it was like slicing through butter and I had far greater control over the jigsaw making my cuts far more accurate!

My difficulty now is bending the tabs. While I have been able to make a basic break with my bench to bend some of the sides I can't seem to bend the others as they are all getting in the way of each other!

Not sure what to do hmmm....

Note: YES! I do realise I should have filed down the sides first and probably cut out the switch holes and fan hole before bending it all!! But I'm very impatient to see results and it made for a better photo :P

It's looking good but yeah you probably should have cut/drilled the holes before making the bends lol ;).

looks pretty sweet nice work man.. keep it up

Chapter 6

I went out and purchased a smaller PSU. While the bigger one would have fitted I want as much space inside the case just incase I want to add other things such as graphics cards or water cooling.

Here is the mounting I done for it. Thanks to the people who reasured me that this support would be enough as it worked great! :banana:

Chapter 7

Here is the motherboard and PSU mounted onto the back panel.

In the next two pictures I have mounted it inside the frame. You can also see the support for the psu as mentioned in the last post

Here is the back panel. I cut out holes for the motherboard and the PSU. There is room for a 80 or 90mm fan but I will leave it for now as I will not be overclocking this PC. (In my opinion the less fans the better)

Here is a dry run testing all the equipment. At the moment I am having trouble with the slot load notebook dvd drive but other than that it is working fine.

You can also see in the picture above the lower half of the side panels on the case. I have drilled a 19mm hole at the front for a power switch and I need to work out how to best attach this panel to the frame.

The top half still needs quite a bit of work as I need to mount the dvd drive and front usb/audio ports onto it.