Project - Air Cube v2

[Waynio]

1 of the gold paint tins was damaged, so I'm thinking of setting it up as is and get around to painting it at a later date when I have a spray gun and air brush gear, spray cans irritate me having to shake forever etc.

[Waynio]

I'll have a picture update or 2 tomorrow I primed the panels today with 2 400ml cans for 5 panels and 3 angle bars, the technique the man told me about is good, but I did it a little different because I did not hang them up, I did them up against a board, the method he said to try was make a box out of the panels in an arch type way and do slowish long sweeping strokes, but I just did 2 at a time it was easier to set up, but I can see how it is a good method if it was set up correctly.

Also got a hole for mounting the cathode switch underneath the extension so the ugly switch will not be visible but very accessible.

Tomorrow I'm going back to the paint shop and possibly getting 3 x Glacier blue just to be safe for the main colour and something like the matisse blue for a faint haze over the glacier, or a completely unplanned colour that catches my eye and of course a couple of layers of clear which I already have for protection.

Also the man said screwed up paper kitchen towel is best instead of wet sanding, because even with 2000 grit it can easily be scratched, so I'll give it a try and hopefully it will work ok, I'm not going to ignore a man with a lifes experience (50 years doing and dealing paint) on something like this.

lol must be fait that the gold cans was damaged hehe .

[Waynio]

Primed.

Colours I chose, Haze Blue was closest I could get to glacier blue, the matisse blue is going to be used for a quick haze spray.

All the paint on the panels are good except for the most prominent one being the front panel, I was stupid and did not take the front extension off when I painted it and do it seperately, oh well something had to go wrong but I'll put up with it, I'm glad I'm not too much of a perfectionist else it would take far too long to do

I'll hit it with a couple of coats of clear tomorrow and will clean up my current parts and add this little beauty for my main hdd on sunday and take some finished pics, then enjoy my new case .

[Waynio]

Thanks mates it looks ok from the angle I shot the pics at, other angles don't look so good, well they do but nowhere near perfect anyway .

The paint in some areas is a little bitty and rough and for the clear I have used just over a can and half, I hope it looks ok when it has dried and cured a bit, really I should have put more work in to getting it smooth, kind of rushed it a bit like usual, but I'll accept the finish anyway, think I should get someone else to do the paint job in my future mods, I lack the patience and experience and quality paint and air brush and spray gun for painting, I'm just not all that good at finishing.

[Waynio]

I got up at 7am, the plan was to do the clear coat and then go back to bed, not been getting much sleep the past few days so very tired.

But it was a pretty nice day so I used virtually 2 cans of clear, let it dry for an hour then put the panels in the sun and enjoyed the nice weather .

I decided to build it back up at about 5pm and managed to get some shots of it in the sun, the polished bits will be cleaned up a bit for the final pics and I bought a touch up pen/brush thing which has primer, colour and clear of the same colour so I can colour the ends which are bare .

I think it looks quite nice and I'm happy with how it turned out, other than the 2 or 3 oversprays I did and the lack of all round smoothness with the paint job.

[Waynio]

Thank you DonT-FeaR & boy 4rm oz appreciated .

Much more space than I thought, which means I could get a sata card and add at least 4 more hdd (if I needed lol), I'm going to get a sata card so I can ditch the ide dvd's I hate the bulky ide cable, it is annoying how this gigabyte p45-dq6 motherboard has 4 extra sata ports but can't be used for normal single drives.

The cable stash area is great, it is holding all the fan wires and the cathode inverter.

The ac ryan quad fan connectors are good but the leds on them always burn out straight away and give off a puff of smoke so I cut all the leds off .

The silver lamptron switches there was a problem, the ring light one was fine but the dot one sounded awful when pressed and seemed faulty, so luckily I was originally going to put black switches with blue ring and blue dot so I put them in to replace them and to be honest they look much better .

When I assembled the pc my sound card disapeared and would not pick up in device manager so I uninstalled the drivers and put it in the next pci slot and put the latest drivers on it and is fine now .

I have ordered a skythe dual ssd 2.5 to 3.5 mounter and will give me the time to prepare my pc for it.

Also I thought I would see if there are any vibrations without thick accoustic foam, and there is no need for it, no vibes .

On with the up and running pics.

Also I think I'm going to need to upgrade photobucket to pro for a short while the bandwidth is being chomped up fast, yesterday I had 3gb left out of 10gb, today 2gb lol.

[Waynio]

Haha, cool front page, Thanks Oneslowz28 .

[Waynio]

Thanks Datech and everyone who commented and kept me motivated, appreciated .

I went and bought another OCZ 60gb summit to put in raid0, here is the bench I run earlier, Awesome performance, I'm amazed how much my pc was being held back, Used to get 50MB/S up to 100MB/S with normal hdd's, everything seems instant now.

And because I have had to let 2 500GB hdd's go to make room for the ssd's which take up the space of 1 hdd and with the extra height because of not needing the acoustic foam I could re design the front panel to be quite different, the extension was purely done so it could hold 2 hdd cages and full size optical drives but could now cope with 1 hdd cage so maybe soon I will re do the front panel.

[Waynio]

Quick update, here is the temps, room temp at the time was 26c.

[Waynio]

Wow, I go away for a while and BAM! This thing is turning out beautifully. I love the part where you get the last screw (or bolt, or rivet, or piece of tape or bubble gum) in place, step back and it's a case. Excellent work, +rep.

hehe , thanks blue and everyone else for comments, let me know what you think of this possible v3.

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I really like the air cube v2, but the size is a lot larger than it needs to be really.

Last night I was fairly low in spirit and was stressed out & I did not feel like gaming or watching anything but was wide awake so I decided to mess about with sketchup by making a more compact and complex air cube v3, and 6 or 7 hours later I have a rough model that is buildable, the main part that will need revising is the middle expansion card mem/cpu air tunnel seperator, the challenge with this one is much higher than my previous ones, also the new great Thermaltake VL30001N1Z Level 10 case inspired me a bit on this one, particulary the heightened area for the cpu cooler, I hope to buy an enermax revolution psu for this and finally get core i7 or even a good amd rig since it will be a complete system needed whichever I choose (mobo, cpu, mem).

Lower deck --- The HDD cage will hold 2 ssd's and 4 hdd's with a fan blowing over them all, a fan in the middle of the back exhausting, I'm going to mount the psu so the fan can take fresh air from the other side, the front will hold 2 optical drives stealthed, 2 illuminated vandel switches, polished trim here and there.

Main deck --- lian-li mobo tray, just above the expansion slots a 120mm fan exhausting the warmth up to a duct that will guide outside the back of the case, standard 120mm fan in the normal spot for the cpu, and 2 120mm fans at the front but with a panel dividing the expansion slot area and the mem/cpu area for good concentrated air flow, polished trim here and there.

Top panel --- Should be self explanatory from the pics I think, with polished trim here and there.

So I'm going to keep the best traits from my v1 and v2 and step up my design a few notches higher this time, the face is just for a laugh on this sneaky peak ... or is it, maybe, maybe not lol.

I don't yet have all the materials (aluminium I need) but might get around to it in a month or 2, and when I do start I'll put updates on every couple of weeks to make sure they are quality updates rather than messy daily ones.

350mm x 350mm base
305mm at lowest area
391mm at highest area
combination of flat bars, angle bars, square bars, 1mm sheet for parts that need bends and 1.5mm or 2mm where there are no bends needed, I know I can do this, will just have to take my time on it to get it right.

Enjoy the funny pics Kryten with big eyes and a huge grin from red dwarf comes to mind, note the other little smillie face and think of the mouth as arms raising too lol

Heres a few pics before I added the silly face and extra angles.