FEATURE!!!!
Wooo hooo!!!!!!
:banana: :banana:
Thanks, guys!
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FEATURE!!!!
Wooo hooo!!!!!!
:banana: :banana:
Thanks, guys!
WHAAAOOOO!!! how the hell did i miss this one! amazing projekt dude!
congrats on the feature! :)
featured in edbpriser.dkīs newsletter and itrends.dk ;)
love it man:up:
Congrats on the International exposure BoB! Well deserved indeed, and thanks for pointing it out p0Pe!
Hee hee. Very cool to see my work on a site that I can't read. :D
Thanks indeed Pope. :up:
Art is art no matter the language. And this is art.Quote:
Originally Posted by blueonblack
This mod is incredible, good job mate!
Well, I broke my wonderful Asus full-ATX motherboard. :mad:
Good news is, I got a new board already, and while it's not the performer the Asus was, it has some good points. It's a microATX, which leaves more room inside for cool stuff to look at, it has more SATA ports and they are much better positioned, and best of all it has an industrial look to it so I don't have to cover it up:
I may end up painting or dying the blue bits on the board black, just for continuity (why in the hell did they put them on there anyway??), but probably not.
Since I don't want that big motherboard tray showing at the bottom I'm going to have to figure another way to mount it, but overall I like it a lot better for this build. Down to one video card, but that's OK. I have to say the only place I ever saw an improvement with Crossfire 4870 cards was in the benchmarks. One of those will do me just fine. :)
Stay tuned, I'm working on something extra special, update in a week or so. Muuuuahahahahahaaaaaa!
(Damn, that really doesn't carry well in text, does it?)
MSI make great boards so you should be happy with the performance. It does fit in nicely with the style of the mod though. As for the blue parts on the mobo, you will probably not see the PCI-e slot with the card installed anyway, if it bothers you it's nothing some permanent marker can't fix. Hiding the VGA port is as simple as making an alu cover, painting it black and attaching it with some double sided tape.
Hiding the VGA port is as simple as a black sharpie.
LOL! A sharpie and duct tape will fix anything!Quote:
Originally Posted by Kayin
Update!!! Wooo hooo!! :banana:
I've been wanting to do something with the top of this case since its inception, but I haven't been able to. The design calls for the top to be easily removable, so I couldn't tether it with any sort of wires or cables or even copper tubing. So I've been thinking it would be plain but for the angle iron on the edges and the corners. I figured out a way to add something to it. :D
First off, the victim:
This is an alarm clock that I found on Amazon for $25 shipped to my door. It is really a fascinating piece of work. It runs on 2 C batteries, and the motor in it has two shafts. The first turns most of the gears you can see in the picture slowly, but easily enough to see. The other shaft turns at a *much* slower speed and actually runs two gearsets to keep time in hours and minutes. Awesome little clock, as I said, but I've got plans.
First off, I stripped it and gave it the rust treatment (I have two of them because I screwed the first one up and had to order another for parts.)
I had to cut out some of the copper drive cage I made to add a mount for the new gearset, and I had to use a different motor. The one that came in it was a tiny little induction motor with exactly zero torque. A fruit fly could have stopped it. Not a buff fruit fly, either, I'm talking about the fruit fly that always got picked on in gym class. Obviously, one speck of rust in any of the gears and it was useless.
I got a little gearmotor from Solarbotics for $7 (and another $9 to ship it, %$#&*#@&*!!!!) and it works perfectly. After much deliberation, teardown, rebuilding, tearing down again, painting, sanding, filing, and many many examples of language foul enough to burn the hairs in the ears of your nearest Catholic bishop, I am finally satisfied with it. Many pics to follow, and hopefully a video. I realize that I have some minor touchup work to do, most notably the wiring, but also some minor paint flaws. It's not quite done, but very very close. :)
Video to follow soon I hope. :)
Hee hee! The speed will be turned down in the finished product, but I need to run it like this for a while to wear in any tight spots where the rust paint is a little high.
I like it...
ALOT!!!!
That is very cool looking.
It would look great with some lighting inside of it. Not sure if you can swing it or not.
Thanks! It will have the purple lighting from the vacuum tubes, and possibly one other source, still pondering that.
BoB, I bestow upon ye the crown of Rust-King. No one does rust like you! lol
Woo hoo!! A crown!!! :D
Edit: And no, Curtis, regardless of what you may have heard it is NOT a tiara. It is a CROWN.
That is some beautiful work there; I think the only thing that would make it better is if it actually still worked as a clock :D
..also, you sir, just got sig-quoted :P
Quote:
Originally Posted by blueonblack
I really like it. thumbs up the rust is also perfect.
Rust-King :D lol, great to see it coming along, keep it up BoB :up:.
Dude, that looks amazing. Fantastic work as always mate. It is fitting together very well.
Dude, impressive gear search fu. How did you ever find that clock? It's perfect! I still can't get over how real the rust effect looks. Even close up it looks like rusted steel. Awesome, awesome work!
Thanks very much. I stumbled across that clock during some gear research. They have others also, which I plan to put to use. :whistler:
And yes the iron effect is almost perfect. I'm not entirely satisfied with the appearance of the green and blue highlights, they're too bright in places, but overall very happy. I think it's cool that I can apply that finish to anything. That ring around the gearset is plexi. The "rivets" on it are thumbtacks. :D That's real rust on those, I used Metal Effects rust activator and a MAPP gas torch to do them.
One word describes this mod. EPIC
I saw this while browsing Ponoko and immediately thought of you.
EDIT: He actually has some pretty cheap gear train sets... $12
looks great man.. loving it!
Update time! I'd really like to watercool this machine. With a good water-cooling setup the pump is inaudible, and as such I've always liked flow indicators. As usual, I prefer the mechanical variety, as opposed to digital or LED. The ones with a window and an impeller.
So, this machine will have a flow sight indicator on it, but I want to be able to see it from outside the machine, and since it won't have a window that put me in a quandary. These indicators are simple, water flow spins an impeller and you look at the impeller through a window. I had to figure out how to transfer that motion outside the case. I want to see motion, I don't want to see water.
I started with this:
Simple aluminum flow indicator I got from Thermaltake, $13 delivered to my door. I even came with three sizes of compression fittings.
The impeller rides on the little plastic spoke inside the plexi windows. To tranfer motion from the impeller to the outside of the indicator housing I decided to use magnets:
Cheap powerful neodymium magnets I got off of Ebay for a couple of dollars. These things are fun all by themselves.
I don't have the parts to watercool this case, so this is just a proof-of-concept model to make sure I can make it work before any serious building happens. I had to affix some of these magnets to the impeller, and in the final assembly that will be done with epoxy. For this test I used tape. :)
And here is the test assembly together with 1/2" fittings and the newly-modified impeller:
Without any actual water-cooling components, my test setup is crude but effective. I used a $7 fountain pump from Harbor Freight and some cheap tubing from Lowe's.
This will be going on the front panel of the case, through two sheets of 1/8" plexi and one sheet of 1/2" plywood. I built a test setup to match that and assembled a magnetic coupler to drive a shaft to turn a gear on the outside of the front of the case:
Got the indicator assembly clamped up and slid the test setup up to it to check the clearances. see the end of the shaft where it touches the plexi? Tiny point on the shaft, this thing is going to have to be damn near frictionless to work. In case any of you are wondering you can't buy mag-lev bearings this small.
So to the test. I am sorry to say that this took WAY longer than I thought it would. I had to go through a dozen configurations or more to find the one that worked. From three magnets on each impeller fin to two to three on just one fin, different combinations on the coupler gear, etc etc etc. But I got it!
Ha! Lots to do with this yet, obviously, but it works.
Awesome blue! Bet you were grinning when you finally got it to work.
Ingenious idea!
Nicely done. Now I see why you were asking about magnets in WC loops ;P
:alien: :up:, Thats going to make a very unique feature blue, dunno where you pulled that idea from but its awesome :banana:.
Well, I'm in for it now. I found this water block for $35 and I couldn't pass it up.
Isn't it pretty??
Unfortunately, I'm at the point in the design that I have to have all my components on hand to plan the placement of everything, so this will really slow down my progress until I get my radiator(s) and pump.
Well, that didn't slow me down all that long, did it? My impulse control is sadly considerably lower than my credit limit. Bad for me, good for this build.
Parts!!!
The basics of what I hope to be an excellent loop. With the components I have and no plans to overclock a single dual-pass 120 radiator should be plenty. I'll be researching tubing tomorrow, since of course regular tubing of any sort just won't work. I've got something in mind but it will require some very specific parts that may or may not exist. Hopefully I'll know tomorrow, but at least I've got what I need to finish planning the layout now. Woo hoo!!!!!
OK, it's time to get this thing done. I only have one functional motherboard and video card at the moment, so every time I want to work on it I have to move the motherboard from my main system to this case for reference, as I'm down to that stage of the build. That plain sucks, so I've ordered a new board, exactly like the one I use, so it can stay in the shop inside this case. It has on-board video so I can move the video card from my system to this case also. That should speed things up considerably, and when I'm done I'll have an extra micro ATX board that will work beautifully for a HTPC. :)
I've also found another motivation. I bought Bioshock 2 two hours after its release. I've been waiting to play this game since the original. I've decided that I will not play it until I can play it on Clockwork. This is a first for me, the game is in my closet and not installed. Maybe this will help me get this thing done. Cross your fingers.
On progress, I am happy to report that I have solved at least half of the tubing issue and it will be absolutely beautiful. More news on that as it happens.
Hehe, good idea for motivation :), the game is awesome blue. I've seen quite a few knocking it on forums but I guess they don't know what a great game is ;).
Update time. I've been pretty busy lately and haven't had time to work on this like I should, but I managed to get a major visual feature done tonight. :D
I've wanted some bubbling tubes in this thing since the beginning. I finally got them. I started with a bubble light normally used for a Christmas decoration.
After some careful Dremel and razor work, we get the useful part:
The copper elbows I'm using were almost big enough. The difference was actually less than the thickness of the copper walls. I managed to drill out the straight portions by 1/64" to get the tube to fit. That was a joy.
Here they are mounted. They look cool just like this.
Small automotive 12-volt light bulbs are inserted into the bottom of the copper elbow from the rear of the panel.
;)
haha those are freakin sweet man! we used to have those bubbly lights on our christmas tree back in the dizzay. I think my rents still have them. +rep for ingenuity and the nostalgia. :D
Thanks, I have to say I am really happy with the way they turned out.
I forgot one other thing I got done. After much thought I decided on the Aerocool Extreme Turbine fan for the rear exhaust/radiator fan, for aesthetic reasons:
I love the way it looks, the blades and the cone give it the industrial look I wanted, and it is dead silent, but it doesn't move hardly any air at all.
I had a Thermaltake turbo fan on hand, which turns much faster and moves plenty of air, but doesn't look as good. So I took the blade assembly off of each of them. The shaft diameter is the same, but the motor on the Thermtake fan is considerably smaller. Just to try it, I mounted the turbine blade on the turbo fan housing and even though the motor is a good 3/16" further from the magnets on the blade it turns it much faster and moves a lot more air. Looks better too:
Do any electricians know if I'm looking for trouble with the motor/magnet gap being so high? I don't see how myself, but I know motors can be picky about their load, especially cheap little DC motors like these.
Do those fans spin in opposite directions? If they do then you could stack them for more airflow. Additionally it creates a weird visual effect when looking at it strait on.
Nice progress Blue, it looking really good, I love this mod :D.
