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Thread: Project - Air Cube v2

  1. #151
    Custom Title Honors chaksq's Avatar
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    Default Re: Project - Air Cube v2

    Wow this is a great mod, and great concepts. Can't believe I haven't checked it out before. Good luck with your family and future mods.
    In Progress An Updated (Mac) Classic
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    Cancelled Dell XPS, Framed, Busy

  2. #152
    Now making cases for the heck of it =) Waynio's Avatar
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    Default Re: Project - Air Cube v2

    Thanks chaksq

    It's been snowing quite a bit here in manchester, enough to make a massive snow man, it's been tempting lol, had a mad idea of making a giant snow man and rolling it into someones garden for a laugh but thought naa, but could imagine it lol , haven't seen that much snow in a while, especially coming up to christmas, there is a car parked in front of the house with a snow mans head sticking out of the roof with a hand waving, looked great last night lol, taken a pic of it today.



    Wasn't as impressed with the temps as my original cube case, and been thinking what did I do wrong, what could be done to improve it without adding higher cfm fans?

    Was thinking of cutting some holes in the mobo tray and adding fans to blow the bottom side of the mobo, but srapped that idea or at least put that idea on reserve.

    As you all seen in the pics how much height the bottom deck had to spare, I have gotten around to re-doing some things.

    I made a new hdd cage from scratch, 1st one I have made that is 100% spot on, it holds 5 hdd's or 2 ssd's and 4 hdd's, every single mounting hole lines up perfect and on both sides wow , so have quite a bit more space on the lower deck so now I'm working on a new front panel without the extension, keeping 3 fans for the top and having 1 optical drive and possibly a fan in the bottom front and rear, this of course means a new paint job, but i'll leave that until I get into air brushing.



    I successfully used my holesaw for the front 3 fans but I really need a good variable speed drill with 13mm chuck, tried using cordless ones that have 10mm chucks and had to use an adaptor which makes it too big and clunky and was making the drills burn out, not permanently thou , the drill press can take it but can't reach in far enough to do the holes where I want them, so switched over to a power drill which has 100% go and wobbles & no variable speed, managed to finnish the job but was rough as hell so until I get a good drill I'm better off sticking with my trusty dremel for fan holes, but I'll make do with this until I get an ok drill, the holes will be smoothed out today.



    Going to put a panel with holes for the wires where the gaps are on the mid panel to keep the tripple fan air where I want it to go,

    I would use a good fan controller but have had them fail on me in the past nearly killing my rig overnight, I woke up to scary high temps, so lucky nothing was damaged so don't have faith in them any more.

    I'll post the pics of it finnished later if I get it done today.

  3. #153
    Now making cases for the heck of it =) Waynio's Avatar
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    Default Re: Project - Air Cube v2

    Marked it all out & got all of it cut up.


    Bolted it back on the frame, the mesh I had in front of the tripple fans did not fit, there was gaps either side because of using a hole saw which made the holes that little bit too big, the holesaw made a mess to be honest because I haven't got a decent drill to put it in, I have another spare sheet of aluminium so can go back and do it again, wouldn't take more than 3 hours with me having this new one as a template.


    Here it is switched on.


    And now, the reason I had a re-work, the temps,


    This is at an ambient temp of 22c and is the same as my original air cube only with less noise and sturdier build, so I guess the bottom deck was suffering from a lack of breeze .

    The new paint job won't be until spring or even summer, still need to get an air brush kit, a range of colours and loads of practice so I can do something decent.

    Merry christmas everyone.

  4. #154
    Now making cases for the heck of it =) Waynio's Avatar
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    Default Re: Project - Air Cube v2

    And now with the lian-li dvd bezel attached to the drive and mounted inside properly .







    The little black box is a quick swappable external hdd.


    That is all until I mod it further & re-paint it.

  5. #155
    Now making cases for the heck of it =) Waynio's Avatar
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    Default Re: Project - Air Cube v2

    First of all sorry for keep bringing this project back from the dead, but there is unfinished business and I'm re-doing the front panel, after that there is just the paint job, promise .

    Got my reinforced cutting discs and extra mandrels from america woo hoo , got about 250 discs now, whenever I have a bit of cutting to do I'll pre-load 10 mandrels for quick change overs, so rather than fiddling around with changing discs I'll be able to really get stuck in whenever doing dremel work now .

    I've been itching to mod something for a bit now after checking out all the amazing mods going on , wish I could afford to start a new project but I could brew up some designs in sketchup, can't seem to look through a load of worklogs without being inspired to do something myself .

    I decided to have another shot at making a front panel, 3rd one now , the original one with the front extension was to allow for 2 hdd cages, I got around to getting bigger hdd's so I wouldn't need 2 cages, I wanted it to have the grills built into the panel but I fluffed it up and the last one was a rushed effort done badly with a holesaw but the added fan for the bottom improved system temps by at least 6c so it was worth re-doing the front, but because I did the fan hole so close to the dvd drive it had a very weak area that was very prone to bending between the 2, I wanted to fix this by raising the fan by 10mm and by doing built in grills instead of just a hole as I originally wanted, also the dvd hole was not as good as I wanted it to be so it all just made perfect sense to get this panel re-done with my moral being high again and having a spare sheet of aluminium .

    Wow, enough blah blah .

    Got a standard fan grill and drew around the inside of the last wire and used a cd and a saucer as a guide to make a pretty basic pattern and used an exacto blade to cut out the holes.


    I decided to do the cutting from the rear side as on my original front, the grills I did turned out better on the rear side.

    Cut a new sheet of aluminium to size and added all the mounting holes, put masking tape on the areas I'll be cutting and taped the stencil in place & used a sharpy marker to print it on, for the switch holes I just drilled a hole and used a round file until they fit perfect.


    60% of 1 of the grills.


    Dremel work done on 1 of the grills, used 3/4 of 1 disc, 1 disc broke, 1/4 of another disc, so 90% done on 1 of the grills, started too late on this and with 3 more to go, thought I'd leave it until tomorrow and give the neighbors peace @ 6pm .


    I'll hopefully get the rest done tomorrow and have it installed on the cube with pictures .

  6. #156
    Now making cases for the heck of it =) Waynio's Avatar
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    Default Re: Project - Air Cube v2

    Spent a lot longer than I anticipated on the dvd hole, but it is such a perfect fit for the lian-li bezel now, must be within a hairline of precision so was not wasted time.

    The spirally type grill took a while to do too, had some hiccups with the printed guide coming loose tried my best to keep it clean dremel work for minimal filing to be done, being sleeping til lateish lately which is why this took a long time, didn't want to be making a racket driving the neighbors mad in the evenings, so now I just got the cleaning of the cuts to do with files and sanding.











    1 thing I must fix is the roof, I think 1 of the joints somewhere in the frame must have been put in slightly wrong as the sides & top front left of the case piece don't sit perfect at the top as they did before I polished and painted it which is pretty much why I added a painted angle bar there to cover it lol I really should fix this hiccup.

    Who knows, if I'm happy enough once I finish this panel and fix part of the frame I might add a window on the other side & jump into airbrush land and repaint the exterior, this case needs a nice finish and then I could see it as my 1st decent scratch build.

    I know I added this project to the completed worklogs thread but with me being low on money to do a completely new project at the moment I figured I'd make the air cube a bit better.

    I get the feeling there is 0 interest in this now? or are you all waiting to comment when it is finished with a new paint job, nonetheless, the updates will keep coming until it is final .

  7. #157
    Anodized
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    Default Re: Project - Air Cube v2

    Thats a nice build you got here, looks great !!!

  8. #158
    Now making cases for the heck of it =) Waynio's Avatar
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    Default Re: Project - Air Cube v2

    , Ah response Thank you cellsite60 .

    OK, last update before I give it a new paint job but not sure when that might be (need to get an airbrush and some paint), hopefully soon , actually there will be 1 more update with the panel installed, then nothing until it gets a lick of paint.

    I did a little extra trimming with the dremal and then used a range of tiny files to get rid of any roughness and then went over the whole panel with 60 grit sand paper dry, then 240 wet, then 600 wet, here is the outcome.








  9. #159
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    Default Re: Project - Air Cube v2

    Really likes those fan grills =)

  10. #160
    Now making cases for the heck of it =) Waynio's Avatar
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    Default Re: Project - Air Cube v2

    Thank you again cellsite60 .

    , Even I didn't expect this update, was just meant to be with the new panel attatched to the case, but.

    I went to file 2mm edge of excess panel off the top and side of the panel to make it a perfect fit, was going to just install it as is until I got around to buying an airbrush.

    But I forgot about the extra can of paint which I used for a faint haze over the lighter blue and seen it sat on the shelf when I was tidying up with a can of primer and clear laquer so just thought why the hell not and cleaned the panel of any dust, oil or prints and primed it, then coloured it and then added the clear, all by the notes on the cans, so once it has dried & have it on the case and update a few more final pictures, then I can officially call this case closed & enjoy the refined case & enjoy everyone elses worklogs & look ahead to designing whatever good ideas come to mind in the future.

    I very nearly forgot about the dvd bezel DOH!!!!, but luckily there was just enough paint for it .

    Wanna watch some paint dry lol .






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