Thats amazing looking, i cant wait
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Thats amazing looking, i cant wait
I love the design and colour. Excellent 3D
I have used the silenx 80mm fans, very quiet. I bought from this location, it's near. http://www.bigfootcomputers.com/Merc...ry_Code=700.22
They seem to alwasy have them in stock.
Hey all. Here’s the first official progress update on Origami. Sorry the for the delay, but I had nothing ordered when I posted those plans. (this is not a bad thing, it’s good to sit on your plans for bit before you start pushing the button on 100’s of dollars of materials…)
Fans and switches are in.
So the only things more ugly than a Noctua fan is SIX Noctua fans! These things are top notch quality, but painfully ugly. I’ll get a can of vinyl dye to them shortly. Big thanks to Moddersmart.com for having the sense to carry these and for shipping them out.
The vandal resistant switches will be used for the power/reset. I originally planned to put them on the back (how often to you really use those buttons), but these switches are just too hot, so they’ll find a home on the front panel. Anyone ever use these before? There are four connectors on the bottom; I assume two are for the switch and two are to power the blue led on the inside. I’m just not sure which is which. Also no sure how I’m going to power the led.
The connections are arranged like this:
+|?
-----
?|-
Also got my fancy aluminum hardware in from Gyford. These kind of things make me very happy.
Here’s the edge of the extrusions used on to hold the corners of the box together
You can see the two channels used the hold the edges of the box there. Also notice the center hole is not tapped. The vender wanted another 50 bucks to tap those for me, so I value engineered and decided to do it on my own. This is a manual die and tap set:
Basically you just screw one of those drill bit looking pieces (tap) down in to the hole which treads the inside. The very hard part here is to keep it straight. My technique is lubricate the tap (silicone spray) then crank in a 1quarter turn, rotate the piece being tapped, and repeat. This lets you keep adjusting the tap to make sure it’s going in straight. It’s actually pretty tricky and I’m sure there’s a better way, but it worked for me.
Now for the plastic. Spent hours at the shop last night engraving the graphic side panels and the one of the vent panels. The plan on the vent panels is to go as big as I can. I’m shooting for 1”. Problem being 1” acrylic way to expensive for me. I’ve scavenged up a large piece of scrap 1” but it’s 16” x 48”. That won’t make one 20”x20” vent panel. I’m going to make one panel out of this in two pieces and seem them back together. I’ll use this for the left side vent which is actually painted black around the edges. Hopefully that will hide the seem. I’ll make the right vent panel out of (4) pieces of ¼” clear acrylic (thus 1”) and glue all the panels together. This panel is clear on the edges and there is no way to make them look like one solid piece, but I think the 4 even layers will still look very nice.
Here’s a shot of both engraves working. One is on the graphic panel the other (with heavy router head) cutting the ¼” acrylic for the vent.
Even equipment this nice has it’s problems. The router is so strong it vibrates the “fingers” on the vent, and this causes the edges to chip because the pieces is bouncing around. There are 21 fingers per vent (times 4 panels) this is a lot of cutting
Here’s a tight shot of the chipped edges…grrr
Fortunately no one will ever see those parts. All the outside edges are very clean and smooth. They’ll get a proper flame polish this week.
I took the suggestion to do a little weight reduction on the vents. I took out a large chuck in the middle. Each ¼” panel weighs 7 lbs. The chuck I took out weighs 4 lbs. The other side made of solid 1” should weight the same so that just saved me 32 lbs! (but this is still going to be a very heavy case). Here’s all four panels. They still need to be cleaned, glued and polished on the edges. I’ll be working on the solid 1” panel later this week.
The graphic panels also had some mixed results. Just so you know it took about and hour and half to take my original vector drawings and prep them for engraving. The koi on the top panel took the most work. I started the two large panels 9:30 pm and they were still cutting at 2:30 when I walked out. Here’s the engraver doing it’s thing
Basically what’s happening is the engraver is loaded with a fine tipped conical bit. It just goes back and forth filling in the shapes I give it on the computer. (like you would color in a coloring book…if you’re into that sort of thing) The blade is cutting through a thin layer of black on the back side of the material, which is clear except for that thin layer.
All this was going very well, until I walked in this morning. (FYI, these engraver run unattended all the time) It seems at some point in the last hour of engraving the machine decided to die. Basically just stopped as it was almost finished. The right side panel was done, but it still has a few wavy lines for the left
This sucks, but I think I can save it. I hand cut the pieces out from the larger sheet. I checked them against the vent panels, and I actually got them out square and correct size. I’ll just need to round the corners and add holes for the end caps. I should be able to put the left panel back on the engraver to finish the missing lines…once it gets working again. That said, the graphic panels are going to look great. This will give you an idea of what the light will look like coming through them.
that's all for now. Thanks for the great advice. I'm wiped....
Well Duh!! I see your problem... That equipment is TOTALLY wrong for what you are doing.. The way I see it.. you should do some research and get some better equipment so those little problems don't happen.. THEN ship all that stuff to me so you won't me tempted to use it and mess up any important pieces..
:D
Just kidding!! Very nice .. From design to production, I am REALLY looking forward to seeing this project come together. Keep up the Great Work!!!
Wish I had access to all that fancy equpiment. The end results look sick nice job, can't wait to see the end results.
Look like I'm getting jealous of a lot of members in here. Really nice job, cool tools too.
+rep for the nice tutorial on tools I will never have access... lol
Wow, those plexi cuts look very nice. I want one of those routers badly, i saw a tutorial on how to make one, but i dont got that kind of dough lol
How, this project is really looking sweet. I have always wanted to do something like this, painting clear acrylic black on one side and then engraving out patterns. Did you buy the acrylic like that or paint it yourself?
Nocturnal: soon I'll be making everyone jealous with my home built cnc router, just like the one seen here.... It'll be big enough to cut out whole computer cases!
i have used the Vandal Proof switches before.
the + and - are for the LED, be careful the led will probably only use 3 volts or so so if you hook it up to anything higher than 3.4 volts you'll probably need a resistor. the other 2 connectors are for the SPST momentary switch, there is no polarity here so just do what ever you want
Thanks. I admit this isn't stuff everyone has access too, but don't sell yourself short either. Those vent panels could have been made with a table saw and hand-held router...thing about it. You could actually cut all 4 panels at once that way. I did it this way because it let me do other things while the machine was running (and it's a bit cooler). You could get a simular effect to the graphic panels by starting with a piece of clear acrylic and then painting it like a graffiti stencil in reverse. I guess the point here is just to be inspired and get there how ever you can. I don't really thing tools are limiting of a factor.Quote:
Originally Posted by slytherock
Thanks 7...glad to know someone else is getting older. I live in NM, which is very dusty. I'm still not sure what to use for filtering the vents. I was thinking panty-hose over the fans, or some white scotch-brite material at the ends of the vent finger (over the fan). The former would require cutting it into strips to fit the fingers, that's 42 total...so I think I'll just filter the fans. The vents are completely removeable (like the exploded renderings) so they should actually be pretty easy to clean.Quote:
Originally Posted by Seven
thanks for confirming that. I just find a way to alter one of the regular molex connectors to power these guys. What is SPST?Quote:
Originally Posted by EPYK
This stuff comes that way. It's not really painted, it's a thin layer of black fused to the a piece of clear. See comment above, there would be nothing wrong with painting clear and engraving it off, masking it while painting, or just scratch it off by hand (like a scratch board from art class). Also you could do a applied vinyl graphics (like you see on car windows) and use those as a paint mask. Vinyl shops are really competative and price pretty low these days.Quote:
Originally Posted by tybrenis
Thanks all for the feedback. The engraver I broke will be back to full health on Weds. I think i might take another crack at the graphic panels to make sure they're perfect. Also should start ordering the actual COMPUTER that lives in side this thing soon.
