Night of the Living Dead 40th Tribute

[The_Crippler]

Total rockstar, man! See, I'd stumbled upon that page quite a while ago - recognized it as soon as I clicked it - the thing is, I'd completely, 100% forgotten about it. Nice one!

[Acey]

The base plan looks uber nice. +rep for creativity!

[The_Crippler]

The base plan looks uber nice. +rep for creativity!

Unfortunately, I'm going to need to modify it a bit. Don't worry, the spirit will still be the same. More on that later

First:

Oops...I think I voided the warranty...



Today was one of those days where I got a lot of work done, but not much of it was photogenic. A lot of cutting angle aluminum and, frankly, that would have been a boring set of pictures. My focus was making the PSU frame for the bottom of the case. Using a miter box, I cut the edges of the aluminum to 45 degree angles:

From there, I added the uprights:

The frame itself is bolted to the bottom of the case to keep it in place:

And there it is:

Now, the frustrating part. As can often be the case, something can look fantastic in Sketchup, but in real life...not. That was the case here:

I used some cardboard to mock up the graveyard side slopes and it just doesn't look right. The slope is too steep and the base will be way too wide (almost 14”.) Well, these things happen, and we work around them, right?

I gave it some thought, and here is what I came up with: I will move the bottom optical drive out and form a case around it, giving me some area to work with. Since the front fan was already going to have a cemetery gate on the front of it, it would make sense to have the graveyard in front of it.

I probably won't have the flat sides on it, rather, I will round it off and blend it in to the sides. It will be less jarring that way. Also, I may stealth the drive front with the brick wall. Honestly, this plan may work better for my ideas in the long run. I plan to recreate a few scenes from the movie, integrated in to the case – and this graveyard gives me some prime real estate for it. (more on that later – I like to have a few surpises.)


That's it for today. Thanks for checking back!

[Acey]

Cmon mate, since you're already going for it on the front, go all the way man. We'd love to see it done.

[The_Crippler]

There will be something along the sides, but not the high slopes from before. It looks really bad, trust me. Thanks for the encouragement, though.

[DonT-FeaR]

cool im awaiting more

[The_Crippler]

More is coming, I promise. Sorry, it's been a busy week. I'm currently working on the back and side panels. There should be an update before the weekend.

[Acey]

Never rush a mod xD we can wait for the good stuffs

[The_Crippler]

I had some time to work last night. As stated, I have been working on the back and side panels (though, only the back panel will feature in this update.)

The more I thought about the back panel, the more I knew I wasn’t going to be happy with it. Seen here:

I was going to have a number of holes to fill (and a new one to cut for the fan) and structure to support – and frankly, that was going to be a lot of pain and bondo dust. Sometimes, you need to work harder, not smarter. In the long run, it was take less effort (and look better) to cut a new back panel from scratch.

So, it was time to give the extraneous stuff the axe:

With that opened up, I grabbed some scrap sheet metal and marked out the important parts…

…a quick run with the jig saw…

…and some rivets.

As you can see here, since it was scrap, the outside edges are pretty wonky. This is what files are for. More on that later.


Side Note: Since this was affixed to the remnants of the old back panel, it actually moved the spacing of the back panel about an eighth of an inch out. This required me to move the motherboard tray so that internal parts still matched up.


Once it was affixed, it was a simple task to rivet in the back panel:

The last structural part to do was add the fan hole. I’d originally wanted to put a 120 back there (as the existing case this computer is in has one) but it just wasn’t going to fit, so I modified the plan to include a 92mm instead. This won’t be a problem, as there’s going to be a 120 on the front, and an 80 mm blow-hole.

Once again, here is an example of the work of my Harbor Freight “Hole Markers”:

And, after some Dremeling:

Hole is cut, but in need of a good filing to smooth it down – and that’s pretty much where I left it for the night. I knew that I had a good amount of filing to do, and that struck me as a pretty good Saturday project.

So this is where we’re at. Once that’s filed down to the proper fit, I’m going to start work on the front. Thankfully, that pretty much just needs a hole cut in it.

[Drew]

Subscribed.

Looks megariffic.