Project: Nutman

[Nutman]

Finally started the assembly phase. This is the fun part of the entire process. It's also the part where progress becomes visible.

I bought some industrial alcohol (for de-greasing the aluminum prior to applying the carbon foil) and Brasso - used the Brasso for polishing the MCW60-R'en:

I also needed a hole for an extra 120 mm. fan and I gave the entire project some thought, test-assembled parts of the PC and made some measuring - then I could mark where I needed to drill a hole for the extra 120 mm. fan - in the bottom of the case:

I borrowed a 114 mm. hole saw and a drill from Boris at h2okoeling.dk and, while risking my life, drilled the 114 mm. hole. I de-greased the case bottom and applied the carbon foil that I had purchased earlier.. Re-riveted the HD rack frame and the motherboard tray rails back on, using standard rivets. Yes, earlier on I mentioned getting countersunk rivets (as the ones I drilled out when removing the parts), but they were impossible to find where I live. This is the result:

Then I took upon me the task of using a Dremel (= copy of a Dremel) for the first time ever and this is what I experienced:

1. Use safety glasses - unless you think you'd love being blind.
2. Use respiratory protection - unless you love iron lungs.
3. Use hearing protection - when you're 60 and able to hear your grandkids, you'll understand.
4. Use the flex shaft - much easier to control than the power tool itself.
5. Make a booth for your dirty work. The cutting dust settles EVERYWHERE!

And yes, I did NOT follow all of these rules, but I will next time - trust me!

But now I'm TOTALLY hooked on cutting aluminum! God damn, it's a great feeling, hehe. If any of you need someone to cut your aluminum case, just let me know.

Aaaaanyway, with iron lungs, tinitus and a gigantic mess on my basement, I present to you a picture of the hole I cut for running the cables from the PSU on the backside of the motherboard tray:

And this cut in the bottom of the 5.25" rack that will make place for the reservoir sitting on top of the pump:

Applied carbon foil to the bottom of the 5.25" rack to cover a lot of scratches:

Visited Studiedata to buy some additional parts, but to my big surprise it ended with Dan at Studiedata handing me over those parts as a sponsor gift! Having said that, I'm not really that surprised, because Studiedata have always been very generous with help, materials and expertise on this project and I've said it before, but it can't be said enough: their customer service ROCKS!

Some pictures of the parts I got at Studiedata:

And finally, a picture of the fan that sits in front of the VGA card. I applied some of the carbon foil to it, in order to cover the fan sticker that was sitting there upside down:

[Nutman]

I realised that I was still missing some parts (you always think you've bought the last part you'll need, but, apparently, you're always wrong, hehe), so after yet another trip to Studiedata and a visit at Bauhaus I came home carrying these parts:

This 120 mm. filter is supposed to sit under the 120 mm fan in the bottom:

These 120 mm. fans will have their fans removed and will be used as fan shrouds:

Also bought some 3M thermal tape. I decided to use the old pump housing instead of the one Riska sent me (because he had removed the mounting brackets and I really need these for mounting the pump) - but I'll remove the heatsink from the new pump housing, cut it into smaller pieces and attach them to the old pump housing using the 3M thermal tape. Also visited Bauhaus to buy some closed cap nuts that I will use for mounting the radiators and their fans:

... and picked up these threaded bars at the same place. I will cut these into pieces for mounting radiators and their fans:

Cut these bits from the threaded bars:

Finally finished filing the 80 mm. radiator, mounted it using the pieces cut from the threaded bars, the closed cap nuts and the Revoltec silicone 80 mm. gasket - the gasket is usually for minimizing vibrations from the fan, but I use it for minimizing the amount of "fake air" (we call it that in danish, heh) between the radiator and the fan, thereby making sure that whatever air the fan sucks in goes through the radiator:

In order to mount the XSPC X20 Delta V2 block on my Abit IX38 motherboard I had to remove the outer mounting rings (not sure which socket they're supposed to be used for) from the mounting plate, since they touched the heatpipe cooler on the motherboard:

Added some C-strip to the hole I cut for the PSU cables. Not pretty, but since it works fine and it's out of sight, I'm fine with it:

Also cut and filed some hex mesh to make it fit the 120 mm. holes in the top and the 80 mm. hole on the back:

And, as a little surprise to all of you, here's a shot from the 1st test of the re-assembled pump. It works great and looks good, too:

[Nutman]

Well, it's been a loooong time since my last update, but a lot has happened on the project....

I got my cutouts - I had ordered 1 grill for the 2 top fans, 1 grill for the fan in the back and one set of letters spelling the name "Nutman".

The guy making the cutouts thought they'd look better in stainless steel instead of aluminum, so I let him decide - he even made 2 top grills and 2 sets of letters - nice guy!

I removed the protective film from the cutouts and test-mounted the 2 grills:

I had painted the hex mesh cutouts that I earlier fitted to the cooresponding fan holes. Now I had to glue the mesh to the fan grills.

I did that by mounting the grills and put the mesh into the fan holes behind the grills - the grills are a bit smaller the the fan holes, so there was room for glueing the hex mesh to the grills.

I apologize for the picture where I am glueing the mesh on the top grill - it's a little hard to see what's going on, but I put some magazines on top of some wrench tops, putting weight on the hex mesh against the grill.

And this is how it looks when the hex mesh has been glued to the grills and the grills have been mounted:

Did a test-mount of the top fans, too:

Sleeved the cables on the pump:

Made a test-mount of the pump to see how it would sit and test the rubber mountings.

I thought I had to provide extra support rubber to the 2 corners where the pump is not bolted tight, but later that turned out not to be necessary.

But here's how it looked at first:

Attached the filter to the bottom fan:

Well, now we're in november 2008 and I was going to visit a friend for a weekend - all-weekend gaming was on and I had to make the machine ready.

I quickly realised I wasn't able to finish it completely at that time - lots of details had to be done and I had to put the water loop in a my friend's place - I didn't have time for all of this before I headed over to his house.

I assembled the machine as much as I could before I left:

Also made some fan ducts from the Coolermaster fans Studiedata had sponsored:

And yes, the fans (2 x Nanoxia on top, sucking air through the radiator and out of the case and 2 x Noiseblocker XL1 sitting on the underside of the radiator blowing air into the radiator) and the fan ducts provided for a pretty "fat" solution:

Test-mounting the radiator (it may look like there's plenty of room, but as I mounted the front panel for my Terratec soundcard it turned out there was no room for the fan ducts, so they had to go):

Well, set up the loop and started leak testing:

The machine was running fine at my friend's house. The CPU temperature never went above 45 degrees Celcius (according to Coretemp) and, according to ATI's software, the VGA temperature was steady at about 35 degrees Celcius at full load. I don't know hos trustworthy these measurements are, but they appear credible to me.

Ok, my brother-in-law had got me these cool aluminum feet for the case:

I was going to mount them in these holes that are way too big for the bolts that came with the feet:

So I had to manufacture some aluminum discs that fitted into the holes:

The result was quite nice:

Lots of room for the bottom intake fan:

Proceeded to the fitting of the letters on the case sides.

First, I put some painting tape on each side panel and made markings where each letter was going to sit:

I used double-sided tape on the letters, pulled off the protective paper and pushed each letter onto the window side panel:

On the other side panel I experimented used a different kind of double-sided tape (the kind used for rugs and carpets):

Yes, yes - nobody's perfect :

However, some of the letters fell off during the night, from both side panels. So, I have decided to drill holes in each letter and bolt them solidly to the side panels. More on that later...

I got myself a defective Lian-Li case to serve as spareparts for this project.

The first part to be used was the Lian-Li badge, as my case didn't have a badge, for some unknown reason:

Slowly started doing the cable management. It's a hassle - ****ing tedious, but has to be done...

As mentioned earlier, I had been trying to make a LED connector panel for quite some time. I went through several solutions:

None of them pleased me, so I decided to make a cover plate for the 3.5" rack (to sit behind the pump), a cover plate for the 5.25" rack to sit on the back of the TerraTec front panel, and a cover plate for the VGA card. All made of acrylic.

I made these plates:

The cover plate for the 5.25" rack was going to be mounted on the back of the TerraTec front panel (=easier than mounting it in the 5.25" rack itself), so I had to drill 2 holes in the sides on the back of the TerraTec front panel a do threads in these holes:

I put the RCA-connectors in the 5.25" rack cover plate:

Did a test-mount before the paint job:

The cover plate for the 3.5" rack (sitting behind the pump) and the cover plate for the VGA card were looking like this:

The hole for the pump's power cable (that has a molex-connector) had to be drilled bigger in the 3.5" rack cover plate and I also made a big hole in the VGA card cover plate to accomodate for the escaping of hot air from the backside of the GPU.

Then the plates were ready for the paintjob - I also painted the cover of an old Vantec Nexus 101 temperature- and fan control I had, because I was going to use this one for monitoring the pump. It's also possible to attach 3 temperature probes to this unit, but I don't think I will be using those - for now...

Paintjob finished:

Painted the edges with UV-reactive green paint, just like the soundcard and the old ATI Radeon 3850 VGA card.

Mounted some mounting bolts on the VGA card, in order to be able to attach the cover plate to the VGA card:

And then I attached the cover plate:

Soldered resistors and wires to the RCA-connectors:

Mounted the 5.25" and 3.5" plates:

Also did a test-mount of the pump, to check how it would sit and how it was going to look:

The back of the 3.5" plate looks like this:

Started making the plugs for the LED cables. Sleeving and using multiple layers of heat shrink is the way to go:

Studiedata had sponsored some Nanoxia fan controls - these fan controls come with each Nanoxia fan - but they're mounted on PCI brackets to go in the back of the case and I really didn't want them to sit there - too difficult reaching them.
I quickly decided to dismantle these fan controls and mount them in a 5.25" fascia.

It's quite a big task - I measured, made markings, drilled the fascia, dismantled the fan controllers and soldered the necessary wires - all I need to do is some cutting and sanding, aswell as mounting plugs that will allow for me to easily plug in fans to the fan controller.

I got 4 potentiometers at hand and I mean to let 1 potentiometer control the 2 fans sitting on top of the radiator, 1 potentiometer control the 2 Noiseblocker XL1 fans sitting on the underside of the radiator, 1 potentiometer control the fan that sits in front of the VGA card and the last potentiometer control the fan sitting in the bottom of the case.
In that way all 120 mm. fans can be controlled manually, while the 3 lownoise (9 dBA!) 80 mm. fans will run at full speed all the time.

By the way: the 120 mm. fans will be powered by the PSU, to lighten the load on the motherboard. I'm not sure the motherboard will be able to deliver power for 2x120 mm. fans at the same time, but the PSU is able to handle this demand just fine - don't worry, I've tested it. - oh, and the potentiometers also seem to be handling this job in a fine manner.

Here's a picture of the present state of the fan controller:

[billygoat333]

holy **** man, thats a lot of PSUs! lol

nice job with the sleeving, and nice touch with the uv paint on the card edge, would love to see an action shot!

[Nutman]

Ok, cable mess all over the place:

Needs to be cleaned up later, once I've mounted the fan controller. And yes, the fan controller is ready!

I started marking where the holes for the potentiometers were to be drilled. Then I stabilized each potentiometer by cutting the existing PCI brackets to fit inside the 5.25 slot cover used as face plate for the fan controller:

Another reason for re-using the original PCI brackets is that it will stop the potentiometers from moving when adjusting the fan speed. There's a small tap on each potentiometer:

However, these taps are to high to allow for the cut-down PCI brackets to sit tight with the 5.25" slot cover, so they had to be sanded down a bit:

Next, I mounted the potentiometers and soldered all the wires:

... and mounted the knobs:

Testing the fan controller:

It works perfect, of course!

Ok, I put the fan controller where it had to go and tried to clean up the cable mess behind the front cover of the case:

Also, I'd like to show you some of the LED cable management:

Mounted the radial fan:

Also bought some faster RAM. It's so cheap now, I just couldn't stop myself:

And here it sits in the machine. Plenty of room behind the hoses:

I had to redo the water loop, because some of the hoses started forming kinks here and there.

Here's the new loop:

If you look really hard you can see something black on the hoses under the VGA card. It's a piece of velcro I had to put there in order to protect the hoses from the hot RAM heatsinks on the VGA card:

All UV cathodes are in place. There's 1 in the bottom (see picture in an earlier post) and 2 sit in the top, 1 on each side of the radiator. It's a weeee bit hard to make pictures of the top UV cathodes, but I managed to get a snapshot of one of them. Not much room up there:

On the motherboard, just below the ATX-socket, there's a LED that lights up when there's power on the board. Of course, it's red and this doesn't quite fit my colour scheme, so I had to cover it as much as possible.

I mounted some double-sided tape on the backside of a piece of foam rubber and put a similar piece of black tape on the top - I thought the foam rubber would be so flexible that it would cover the surface-mounted LED pretty good, but that wasn't quite the result. It DOES block most of the red light, but not all of it. I will have to make a better solution later:

Started mounting the letters on the sides of the case.

I bought a 2 mm drill and countersink drill for stainless steel and used my new, lovely drill press to make nice holes in the letters:

Here's the first letter:

If you take a look on the back, it does matter where the bolts go - if you look closely you can see that I had to move the first letter a bit up, because the bolts were blocking the correct fitting of the side panel:

All letters mounted on both side panels:

The bolts were too long:

So they had to be cut shorter:

Now, the side panels sit nicely. It's starting to look like a computer!

Actually, the computer is very close to being done.

All that's left is some polishing and some small details.

For instance, the CPU cooler is rather greasy and needs to be polished:

The very final update will come "soon".

[Nutman]

holy **** man, thats a lot of PSUs! lol

nice job with the sleeving, and nice touch with the uv paint on the card edge, would love to see an action shot!

Yup, and what's even more impressive: I sold most of the PSUs now. Only had to throw out most of the small 145W ones, as it seems like no one was interested in those.

However, kept 2 myself for leak testing, cathode testing, LED testing and such.

Good idea with a video - but, but, but....

A video will come at the very end of this project. The reason for this is that I've changed my mind (and then the configuration) sooo many times during this build that I won't do any live capturing until it's done and over with.

A little example: Since the last picture post I've sold the E6750, bought an Q9550, sold the 4850 and got a 4890 instead, bought an Aquaero, bought another Laing DDC (10W version), sold the MCW60-R and got an EK4870 full block to fit the 4890, bought a XSPC Dual DCC Bayres One and sent it back to get a XSPC Dual DDC Bayres Two instead (just arrived today, actually), bought a complete water cooling set from MIPS for the mainboard, stripped the entire case to do some painting and/or anodizing....

To name a few changes, that is....

So, bear over with me and look forward to the next, fresh batch of pictures coming up in a week or two. I'll try to work fast and focused now, because the machine HAS to be finished in a month or so...

[mDust]

holy **** man, thats a lot of PSUs! lol

I agree...WTF? I see you have a collection of cases as well...

Everything looks great so far. Please get a 'dark room' UV effect pic!
I thought I'd say your top CPU hose looks a bit kinked unless it's just refracted light. Also, just a detail recommendation, I'd take the stickers off the green UV fans and possibly paint the motor wires black (I wish manufacturers would just hide them to begin with ). But that's just an unnecessary 'final polish' type detail.

[p0Pe]

haha hey nutman! glad to see my pump top in use, and now your getting rid of it huh?
the worklog must have taken AGES to translate? i can still see minor danish in it some place the ammount of pics is just... wow...

really looking foreward to updates on this mod a long time since i last saw it

[Nutman]

Thanks for the kind words, guys. In about 5 minutes, there will be a new update here!

pope: Yup, it takes ages to translate and yes, I start the worklog in danish, so I'm sure you can spot it in the translation

[Nutman]

Yeah, well. It's rather typical - this is NOT the very final update, because a lot has happened in the meantime.

As you might recall I had ALMOST finished the machine and I even made some "OMFG! It's finished!"-pictures - but then reality kicked in and I made some decisions regarding stuff I wasn't satisfied with and that HAD to be corrected.

I'm giving you 2 collages of the pictures I made. They show you how the machine was looking like before I decided to dismantle it again for further modding.

Ok, I got a good offer on an ASUS ATI4890 and I took it - so that's the third graphics card used in this build (3850, 4850 and now 4890)! Hopefully it'll be the last for now....

I was offered an EK4870 full block and made an enquiry with EK in Poland to check if that block would fit my graphics card. Got a very fast reply saying that it would fit fine, so I bought it and here it is:

Once more I visited Studiedata and brought this stuff home:

The pump and the Aquaero was not bought at Studiedata - I purchased those from one of the guys working there.

However, the new radiator was sponsored by Studiedata (it's a used one from an old project of theirs) and I think it looks like an Alphacool NexXxos Pro - an older one. Since I have a NexXxos Pro II sitting in the top of the case already, I exspect performance from the new one to be pretty much the same since this one is going to sit in the bottom, sucking in the cool air.

I get a good discount on the rest, but it was not entirely for free.

The radiatoren and the pump was cleaned using a mixture of vinegar acid and normal water:

Another decision I made was to get a Quad core CPU, so I sold the "old" E6750 and bought a Q9550 instead:

Since I now had a Quad core CPU, I felt I needed a better CPU cooler. So.. out went the XSPC X20 Delta V2:

...and in came the D-Tek FuZion V2 with a Quad Core nozzle:

Also bought a new reservoir that will take 2 Laing DDCs:

...so the old one had to go:

Since then I've returned the XSPC BayRes One reservoir and got the new model, the BayRes Two, instead... pictures of that one will come later.

Since the full blcok was added to the graphics card there is no more room for this fan:

It was mostly noisy and not really any good, so kinda glad to see that one go!

Since I'd purchased an Aquaero I didn't need either the home made fan controller nor the Vantec Nexus 101 fan controller anymore. Out they went:

I also sold my Terratec DMX 6fire sound card, so the LED connector panel couldn't be mounted anymore as it used to be mounted on the back of the front panel for the Terratec sound card. So the LED connector panel also went into the bin. Not feeling bad about it - I had come to realize that it was ugly, so I'll make something better.

Also threw out the plate that sat in the back of the 3.5" rack since it really didn't have a purpose anymore. I was going to move the pump to the new reservoir and the new radiator in the bottom meant that I had to remove the HDD rack and mount the HDD under the 3.5" rack instead. So, out went the HDD rack:

I'm planning on mounting the HDD hanging from the 3.5" rack, so the 2 80 mm. fans will still cool the HDD. However, I haven't made the mounting mechanism yet, so for now the HDD will just be mounted inside the 3.5" rack...

I wanted to mount some light under the motherboard, since I had seen some mods where they did this - and it looked pretty good. Luckily, I had 2 spare CCFL tubes in the somewhat right colors, so I wanted to install them under the motherboard.
The problem was that there was not enough room for the tubes under there, so I had to remove the protective plastic tube, thereby exposing the raw tube and the wire that runs along it. I wrapped it in scotch tape to isolate and protect it. As you can see, it works:

I was also planning to paint my PSU since it was metallic dark blue and didn't really fit the colors of the case. Plus, the fan grills were golden and didn't really fit, either. As you may have noticed earlier, I bought some black fan grills for the PSU, and now I had to re4move all the stickers prior to painting the PSU:

And here it is, ready for the paint job:

As you might have noticed, I'm in the basement now. I have my cozy little workshop here, so let me show it to you:

Yes sirs and madams, my wonderful drill press - a christmas gift from my parents! As you might have noticed I bought a real Dremel! It was on sale, so I really had no choice, hehe:

More to come...