LotusBlossom

[amberella]

Holy crap she's posting an update!

So last we spoke (16 months ago **ahem**) I had sliced my finger basically in half while working on my case mod. It was one of those things you think, "Nah, who could REALLY hurt themselves if you have half a brain?" Well, the answer to that is apparently, me (and you). So be careful - a simple slip and you end up with 12 stitches, a lot of painkillers, and three months without full use of your left hand.

At any rate, this was only the first nail in the coffin of my mod at the time.

Nail #2: my lease was up and I had to move. I trucked all this project stuff to my parents' house where I was staying while looking for a new apartment (in New York, not Florida). Then the company I worked for closed (nail #3) and I was also sans job. S'ok, I thought, since I would need a new job to go with the new apartment anyway. Instead, the IT director at my company asked me if I wanted to stay in Florida and start an IT consulting business. I did, so we did (nail #4). Oh, and then 2 months later I ended up moving into his house/our office and we got married in march (nail #5). That's a lot of nails!

And during this whole time, the case and all it's accompanying tools, paints, components, and stuff sit in my old room at my parents' house, where my mom had so thoughtfully covered the entire eyesore with decorative pillow shams. I kid you not.

Now though, Axel (the business partner/husband) and I are back on the moving-to-new-york bandwagon. We're selling a TON of systems and components left over from the old company on ebay, along with all the extra tech stuff we've accumulated around the house. That means a lot of cleaning up and "refurbishing" of systems. It's taking over my house. Seriously - this is what my house looks like right now (and this is not even the half of it):

The bedroom:

The couch:

The hallway:

The office:

Hey wait... what's that on the floor??? Why ... It's the lotus case mod project!!**

**kind of



Soooo - yesterday I suddenly got it in my head to set up the "lotus blossom" system to see if the components even work at this point and upgrade the hardware with stuff literally lying around my house. Then I will keep just that ONE system to play with and I'll be able to sell even more stuff. Basically I'm preparing to fit 1200sqft of house into 800sqft of NY apartment, any Axel already has multiple servers and desktops that can't be sold because they're our daily workhorses. Hence, most of my stuff is now useless as, quite frankly, I never considered myself to need a terabyte of storage or my very own RAID array. Sad, but true.

Long story short, Axel and I hooked everything up to see if it works, completely sans decoration. It is not, as one might say, the "Best Case Scenario." Rather, it's a messy rats' nest. BUT - it's a messy rats' nest that WORKS!

Some things I noticed upon exhuming this project:

1. Do not spraypaint those pretty round IDE & floppy cables! (Unless you're using special paint for plastic, I guess.) I had tried sprying white cables with the UV paint (and sealer) and they turned into a sticky MESS. Gross gross gross dust magnet. I threw them out (hence the ugly floppy and too long IDE cable).

2. Once piece micro form factor acrylic cases are a bitch to set up. But you knew that already.

3. Someone asked what UV paint I used. It was ClearNeon.

3. Under the wrong conditions (like a hot garage and a Florida summer), epoxy yellows like that's it's job. The test board that I did my initial lotus stencil design on looks like this:

The board was in the heat for a few months, then inside for the rest of the year. The board is on the left, against a white sheet for comparison.

4. Modding with a friend is fun! It's like having extra hands.... and someone to clean up after you!**

**Just kidding++

++not really.


So from here, I am back on the bandwagon. I NEED to get my house ready to go on the market, but I WANT to work on this project again. So I might not be able to update again ASAP, but I will finish it, I promise. After re-reading the thread, I realize how frickin' cool of an idea it was, and how sweet it will look when it's completed. I have had some great new ideas about how to approach some of the artwork that will be more feasible in the real world. For example, painting the components themselves rather than introducing "covers" would be a lot more practical, and potentially look just as cool, but work better with the space allowed in that TINY case. Also, I got so many little 3 bulb UV lights that really are kind of unnecessary. And I painted their covers before thinking that they needed to have clean plastic joints, so there's clear coat paint globs on some that keep them from snapping back together. C'est la vie. There's more, I'm sure, but I'll have to meditate on it and post later.

And one more thing: Thanks so much to everyone that sent me replies and messages over the last year; I had no idea I'd have so much feedback when I finally logged in again!

Best Wishes to all and sorry for the monster post!

amberella

[amberella]

So this evening I re-approached the project from a logistical standpoint. The first thing I noticed is that this is a crazy small case. The wood panel that is meant to cover the top of the optical drive wouldn't even go into place without removing the motherboard.

With the wooden pieces I had already crafted propped in place and me holding the power supply, you can see what a tight squeeze it is. It was hard enough to connect all the cables before there were any obstacles in the way; I'm going to need to be very careful not to block access.

On the other side of the case (which I didn't photograph) the acrylic jogs around the 5.25" down to the 2 3.5" drives. The shape is kind of like a "Z". At first I was going to make the far side of the wooden box straight and ignore this jog, but now I see that where the motherboard juts out to - in combination with where the front power switches and lights are - means I'll need to follow that zig zag. Furthermore, I'll need to complete this box and install it piece by piece while simultaneously screwing in the drives each step of the way or I won't have access to those mounting screws later. So basically once this mod is done, I won't be updating this system EVER. But it'll look cool, so whatev. Here are all the wood pieces to make the main box, laid out so that I can figure out what to draw on them:

I've decided to stick with the themes that I initially intended, but maybe to expand upon the designs. This is mostly because I can't really remember what I wanted the finished design to look like from before. I know that I wanted to use the lotus blossom and some eastern thought concepts. I had created that fan cover with the ouroboros on it, but now I see that it's too tight a squeeze to use it. Instead, I'm going to incorporate the snake theme somewhere else. This is what I came up with just free-handing it as a start. I want the 3-dimensionality of the box to be reinforced, but with something simple enough that I can stencil. I want the finish product to look "stenciled" as a style choice.

Now that I'm thinking about it - Maybe I should try to set up the box as it will be in the case and draw the snake moving through the box like it was crawling through the drives? The right 3 panels are the "Z" jog and aren't very visible in the case so they don't need to be too complicated. Thoughts?? Something completely different?

[amberella]

Under my amberella, ella, ella, ...

LO-frickin-L ... no - that has yet to come up.

Are you going to paint the wood, or leave it looking like wood?

It's going to be painted super clean white with the UV paint so that with UV lights off it looks blank and sterile, but with lights on it's all bling-a-fied.

I've been preparing to move, but found some time to do research on the type of dragon i'd like to add to the project. I'll have that to post soon. Today I created a paper mock-up of the main box structure since working on it flat was not quite jiving and I want to make the snake/dragon look less like it's crawling ON the box, and rather more THROUGH the box. So here's a little pic of the boxy paper thing. No biggie.

In the meantime while I have the camera out, I finally took a pic of this mixed media art piece thing I did in an unrelated incident. (It's big and hard to photograph). The thing is about 5 feet wide. It's old comp pieces on stained wood with acrylic paint. And the binary is that old school punch labeling tape stuff. Also, here's a link to bigger version (1400x702) if you're interested.

Ok, perhaps more tonight - I'm going to work up a dragon.

amberella out.

[amberella]

New dragon? Gotta make the body all 3-d stencil-looking woven around the box there.

[amberella]

Did some more work on the dragon - working on creating the right positive/negative space so that the stencil won't fall apart. That's so anti-climactic.

goodnight.

amberella ::

[amberella]

I finished as much as I could with the box taped together, then I had to cut it open and lay it flat to finish. I think I'm ready to start cutting out some stencils! Plus - hopefully I finally figured out how to make my pics small and clickable to the larger image within the forum's posting structure. Yeah, I'm kinda slow sometimes.

amberella ::

[amberella]

on the wood it looked like a weak little snake lol.

my thoughts exactly - though i was leaning towards "worm." it was late, i was being lazy.

Today I cut the last of the wood pieces I needed. This was not and easy task. First of all, I forgot to add in the extra horizontal distance of the screw heads holding in the drives since the case was empty when I measured. So I cut everything, went to mock it up ... and there were gaps. So I re-measured and re-cut. What's that saying? "Measure once-ish, cut three or four times?" At any rate, now it's fine.

Second of all, and more importantly for anyone considering doing a case mod with one of these "one-piece" clear acrylic cases - THEY ARE NOT SQUARE!!! They're **close** to square - but they ARE NOT. So add in the fact that the thing is so small I can hardly get the pieces in place even with the thing empty, and it turns out that making a square box inside one of these cases is somewhat akin to creating a 3-d model of an escher print. This blows.

But nevertheless, I am pushing forwards and have "fudged" the square shape to a reasonable degree that I don't think it will be noticeable in the finished product. Of course, no one would notice if it weren't for the fact that THE WHOLE DAMN THING IS CLEAR!!!

Ugh - just a little frustrated tonight, apparently. But the pieces are white and once i finish fixing the sketch so that it matches the new dimensions, I can start on the stencils. Some pics:

My very high-tech painting layout:

Perhaps even more ghetto, but it works (and don't worry - all the possible holes are covered):

My assistant:

Peace out.

amberella ::

[amberella]

Of course, they have no excuse if they have actual tools. Like, if they have a table saw at place-that-your-case-was-made, then they have no excuse. They just suck. .

This is my point exactly. I would have made the whole damn thing myself, but I thought I would eliminate a lot of errors by letting the "professionals" do it at the cost of it not having the exact specs that I wanted. I mean, most of the case is fine - and if I was just screwing crap into it, I probably wouldn't have even noticed. But that's not their market, and they should know that people who want those cases want right angles. Not to mention that the screw holes for the motherboard are also slightly off. I mean, if the board was flush with the side of the case and there weren't little spacers to hold the board off the wall, the holes wouldn't match up.

BTW - "they" is ClearPC

I know there have been a lot of reviews of this case and I was going out on a limb with it. It has pretty rounded corners you wouldn't get in a flat-lack acrylic case, but not much flexibility. Yet, none of the reviews mentioned this inexactness. Heck, I had to enlarge the front installation holes for the indicator LEDs that THEY provide with the case!

Anyway - I have to teach my Saturday yoga class now. Good stuff, since I clearly need to chill out. Om.

amberella ::

[amberella]

I am working more on my stencils today, and I've decided to change my approach a little from my initial concept. At first, I thought that I would be replicating the same lotus more than once around the case, and therefore the stencil's main goal was to provide the replication of the same pattern. Now that I've changed the design, however, each stencil will really only be used once and it's more of a style choice (and because when I started the project this uv paint was only available as spraypaint - now they have brush on, too). Instead, I've decided to use the stencils to get all my straight lines, but I'm also going to focus on the blending of the colors.

During testing, I realized that when the purple and green crossed each other, I got a white color. Now - I'm not sure if this is due to the pigmentation (where purple and green would normally make brown) or the chromatics of the spectrum (where neon UV colors seem like they should bend some amber/magenta/green rules) ... but it's white in practice, so I'm going with it. What I've done is cut some of the areas on the main (green) stencil over where they would contain both green and purple coloring, with the intention of taping over the area that would contain the color I'm not spraying. This should give me a "fuzz" effect that will blend the colors when I switch the tape. The secondary stencil has holes only where the entire area would be purple. I'm not sure if I'm explaining this well, but hopefully you'll see later.

This is the first stencil, scored, not entirely cut out yet:

Stencil A (Green color & some purple shading):

Stencil B (Purple Only):

Stencils on top of each other:

amberella

[amberella]

This is cool. + Rep for showing us your methods...no matter now ghetto :p-Dave

Thanks. I had to go read up on this "rep" system since I don't think it was in place when I started this log so many eons ego.

So it took me 11 hours of stencil cutting to finish them yesterday (and an ouchy blister on my finger), but they're finally done. Because of the semi-transparency of the plastic sheets, getting pictures is not so easy, but I tried.

If I can get my big UV light today, I should be able to paint after the sun goes down.

Funny - last time I was working on this mod I was also getting ready to move apartments and I really wanted to paint everything inside on the assumption that the next residents probably wouldn't have any blacklights ... in which case the overspray and such is invisible, And if they did for some reason - free bonus surprise! I'm a dork.

amberella