Project : Lupine

[Tech-Daddy]

Thanx bro!
I tried a little 'speriment on a scrap piece of LEx in the gee-rage. Used a heat gun and a piece of wood to practice with. Worked like a champ!

Thanks for the input!

[sXenoG]

Glad to hear it. Cant wait to see waht you do with the lexan.

[Tech-Daddy]

Sanded and put down a thrid coat of black on the front panel (which bubbled and looks like absolute crap, but I'll deal with that on the sanding) and then I put my 2nd on the back panel and it came out splendid!

No pics, just a verbal on those. Most of tonights work was spent planning cable management. I'm thinking hard about cabling, because I recieved the following tonight:

Made by www.lizard-tree.com and they look GREAT!!!
Perfect match on the color. These will be for the cabling, the base will be black, and this wrapped around the black for accenting. Mmmmmm!

Contemplating a 120mm fan grill based on this design:

And some misc. wolf tracks on some yet to be displayed acrylic work:

I'm also drawing up plans on a front panel design that incorporates some of the above elements... but those are sketch pads in my head right now.

Since I have a need for a 20 to 24 pin adaptor, by virtue of this motherboard, I 'm planning on a bit of modification of this adaptor. I'm also going to cut a hole in the side of one of the 5 1/4 bays, so that I can route the adaptor out and allow for the current ATX cable to be routed behind the motherboard tray (through a yet to be punched hole in the mobo tray). I will have cabling shown, as I want the cables to be seen.... I just want them neat, and always attractive to be viewed.

More later... I'm tired!

[sXenoG]

I was kinan worried that you were just going to throw those springs on. Then i read that you were doing blad first and i think thats an excelent choice. Will look marvelous.

[temmink]

Wow, I have been away for a bit and I come back and see this!!! Wow, just Wow. That is phenominal (and not like the Travolta movie I mean really awesome!). Cannot wait to see the finished product!

[Tech-Daddy]

Welcome back bro! and thanks for stopping in on my thread! Much appreciate the comments!

More later today!

[jonopaul01]

I too have been away for a while and I agree completely with temmink. This mod is amazing, the cuts, etches and that fan grill would look great, keep up the good work, can't wait to see more!

[Tech-Daddy]

Today will be a big update (hopefully) as I have about 1 week to completion on this, and I *need* to get lots of little things done. I've currently got the power supply gutted open (still pulling parts so that I can get it painted, and I've got a number of cuts that I need to complete on the motherboard tray for cable routing purposes.

I've got some prototyping with paper to complete then some acrylic cutting and bending.

Lots to do, lots to do!

[Tech-Daddy]

Good evening all!
Most all day in the garage, and I have a few things to show for it!

First thing I wanted to get done today was the acrylic cover for the side of the drive bays. I love the functionality of the sliders for adding and removing hardware, but I realized a few things about those beloved mechanisms...
1) They would be difficult to paint
2) They slide back and forth, making the surface painting under the slider a messy and maintainence prone affair.

So, I opted to build an acrylic cover for the bay area.
Here I am fleshing out the space and shape requirements with a piece of folded poster board.

I then layed the template out on the acrylic and outlined what I needed to shape:

My first attempt at cutting it out with a jig saw failed miserably ( I can only believe it is the cheap nature of this particular type of acrylic... but that is me guessing. It did not happen to me while working with Delvie's acrylics...), and actually instantaneously split the panel that effectively rendered 2 hours work... useless.

So I redrew the template, and then cut it out with a dremel bit. I knew that would work, but it took so much longer to complete that way... ugh. Oh well, gotta improvise sometimes!

Here is my impromptu acrylic bending station:

Ahhhh... success!

After a lot of test fitting and shaping with a dremel sanding drum, I got it to the shape that I wanted! Now, to disguise the bays, I started out by spraying the back side of the bay cover with the purple X-Metals/Metalcast paint. This will transparently tint the acrylic to purple, where I will add on a sweet paint that I found from Krylon. It is a glass paint that they formulate to be sprayed on the inside of glass lids. The silver color actually dries to the bottom of the coat. It is designed to be painted inside of glass jar lids, so that the jars looke almost like chrome! So, I paint this over the back of the purple, and I end up with a silver reflective finish backing the purple! (remember the metal/silver base I did on the case... well, think the same thing here, but with a twist! )

First coat of purple:

Now, while the 1st coat on the drive bay cover was drying, I grabbed my 20 pin ATX power to 24 pin eATX power adaptor, and decided it was MUCH to colorful! So, little trick... if you dont have any gloves laying around, grab yourself a plastic grocery sack, and put it over your hand that holds the adaptor as you spray it down with black vinyl dye! Certailny keep the ol' fingers a bit cleaner!

Before:

After 1st coat:

Now, I have the drive bay cover and the eATX adaptor drying... what next??? I was like a shark looking for something to attack! heheheh... My unsuspecting Power Supply....Antec 430w... would you *look* at the cables on this thing! I love it! So much so, that not *one* cable on this will be modded. I want to keep them incase they get traded into another machine later.

Gutting it open (good bye, warranty! )

The Antec came with gold fan guards... I'm swapping them for silver fan guards to be shot purple by the metalcast later!

And, while I have everything out, I needed 2 holes on the back side of the motherboard and drive bays to accomidate some custom cable routing later on.

[Tech-Daddy]

2nd coat of Purple (that did not go on well... I am SOOO pissed off... I hope it did not ruin the bay cover. We'll see. Grrrr.....)

Hey! What is a coomputer without a mobo, and the mobo finally makes it's first appearance! An Asus A8V-E Deluxe (socket 939, VIA 890 based PCI-E
solution) with an FX-53 already making itself at home!

Joining in the fray was a Coolermaster Hyper 48 CPU cooler. This is a $40-$50 cooler that I found on sale for under $9 NEW!!!! (bought 2!) I about flipped out! It looks great, and according to the reviews that I have seen, is a pretty darn good performer!

It comes with everything seen here, is P4 and K8 ready (not that I need the P4 bit... but maybe I can make something useful out of the spare parts later! )

The base is very smooth, and only an insane CPU lapper would go after this surface... Mmmmmm, tasty!

After mounting the heatsink, and getting the heat pipes oriented the way I wanted them to go... I realized that the fan lead for the CPU fan was now hanging in the front of the CPU.... that is a "no no" in my book. 4 Screws off the top, twist the fan 2 clicks so that the lines are now sprouting out the back... and then I screwed the fan back into place!

Then I sleeved that awful loud colored cabling on the fan, trying to subdue it a bit and calm it down to work with the rest of my mod...

Damn, that looks a *lot* better, and leave plenty of room for my new memory that I won over on insaneTek (http://www.insanetek.com/forums/show...5&page=1&pp=10), TWINX1024-3200XL's with black heat spreaders!!!!
Yummy!

Just waiting for the case to give it a home... damn. that looks nice all by itself!

What? What did you say? "What about the ATX adaptor?" "Did you finish it up or did you leave it half painted like the earlier pic?" Heck no! 4 coats later.... Hehehee... trick on this piece was that the cluster of cables caused problems getting all of them painted, so I'd have to wait until the vinyl dye dried, then I'd flex the bundle or twist it, until I had more cables exposed. Then I'd spray what I saw. Mind you, I made it a point to make sure that no dye touched the pins on the bottoms of the plugs. Only the sides and the tops... and the cables... were sprayed.

And this is a teaser pic for what I plan on doing with the rest of the cables in Lupine....

Mmmmmm, tasty!



More tomorrow! I'm rolling now!!!