miXture

[brinkz0r]

Hi all

A while ago, I started building a case with a friend of mine. We chopped up his Cosmos S in the first weekend, and rarely spoke since. The case has been on a shelf in my house ever since. About two weeks ago I wanted to get rid of the case, so I gave him a call but he didn't want it back. A few days later, the Cooler Master contest popped up

This is the case we started with, a CM Cosmos S:

The first thing we did was to remove half of the drive bay mounts:

The red lines show what is going to happen to this poor case:

Yep, that's where we chopped it, Leepu style!

Without giving everything away, this is a sketch of what will happen to the left side of the case. The right side will stay completely stock, to give as much contrast as possible

The plastic parts had to be cut sometime, so we're starting with a rough cut. First the drawing:

Then the cutting :dremel:

There's no way back now

[brinkz0r]

Update

Today we are working on the top of the case, which holds a few metal and plastic parts that needed to be cut. The first thing I had to do was to draw a line, with a little help from my laser

The cutting line now looks like this

It took a little while to get it right, and I used multiple tools, but at this pic I finished this part:

The big piece of mesh was a lot easier after that, I only had to use a Dremel. A few years ago I didn't really like the tool, but now I am able to work with it I use it very regularly

This piece of plastic holds the back piece of mesh:

All together, to assembly looks like this:

I made this assembly just for fun, it's made of all the parts that were cut off

To finish off, some overview shots with the modded parts

The left side panel is up next, or more exactly the plastic parts of the side panel. That's going to be hard to get right

[brinkz0r]

We fast forward to last weekend, when I gave the case a good stare down. It was time for a new approach and new plans

I decided the first thing to do was to reinforce the case a bit, since we've cut out so much of the frame. The side panel will be made of 8mm Lexan, so that will be a little heavier than the original side panel. I started with a 2mm black alu panel:

And after a lot of cutting and fitting

Before I was able to mount it to the case, I had to get rid of all the bumps that are in the top panel, like this one:

So I grabbed a hammer and a piece of wood, and start hitting the poor thing. This is what happed to everything that was standing on my workbench

But it worked very well and I was able to mount the black plate to the case:

I hope you're liking what I've done so far, but there will be a lot more where this came from There is still a lot of work ahead of me, so we'll meet again next time!

[brinkz0r]

The second bullet on the list was the reinforcement of the back. As you can see, it has a lot of non-usable holes, for a 120mm fan and the power supply. Also, I won't be using that single watercooling hole.

Again, I'm using black 2mm alu:

The rough shape was made to fit the back of the case, which was pretty hard to do nicely. Then I drilled a few holes to mount the plate:

After which it was much easier to cut the other lines:

It has not been bolted to the bottom of the case, because I'm not sure if I am going to place the PSU there. The case is much more solid already, and the back looks way nicer now

[brinkz0r]

Update

Slowly but steady I'm working towards building the new side panel. This is gonna be one hell of a job, but we'll see how it goes. For now, I need to remove some more plastic from the old side panel:

A few rough cuts with the Dremel left me with this:

At this moment I forgot to make a few pictures, but the end result isn't very much different from the picture above. I did still make a hole to bolt the plastic to the case.

But before I can mount a new panel, the case needs a few more mounting points. I am using these two pieces of angle aluminium that were laying around, as was everything I've used so far. The sizes are different but that doesn't matter:

After an hour of cutting, drilling, measuring, drilling, fitting and bending, this is the result

Like a glove

The strip at the top was a little easier, because there's no bend in it. So I was able to mount it after just a little work. To mount it at the right place the first time, I took a scrap piece of acrylic that automatically gives me the right angle of the side panel:

For that I used a few pieces of double sided tape:

Four drilled and tapped holes later, I am able to mount it to the case. Now it looks like a side panel can me mounted to the case

I know the angle bars don't have the exact angle of the side panel, but I will be working on that in the future. Also, I don't know how precise I have to make everything to be able to mount the side panel properly, still have to figure out that part.

This is it for now. This is the work I've done in the last few days. I want to update this log at least every week to keep everything going, and hopefully there won't be a lot of work left at the end of the contest period. Fingers crossed, and see you next time

[brinkz0r]

Update

The (still unknown type) GPU will be watercooled in this pc. To do that, I will be using this old radiator I had lying around. The white residue appeared during high temperature testing, it's probably water scale. As you can see, a few sheets of white paper do wonders for a clear image.

I will sacrifice the bottom three bays for the radiator:

Once again, I will be using 2mm aluminium for constructing the radiator holder:

Just to make sure the holes were drilled well, which was the case fortunately

This is what the plate looks like after bending, drilling mounting holes and cutting out slots for other parts of the case. Removing the protective foil is always nice

This is what it looks like after putting it in the case:

For now, this is the complete assembly, of course the fan is still missing. If the aluminium is still visible through the front, I will be painting it black or white in the future

These two colors make it really easy to go to the next part, the reservoir. The other seven bays will be used by my very own production reservoir, Liquitwist Orders can be placed from now on, see my website http://brinkofmodding.com for all the details

[AmEv]

Whoa!!!

[Fuganater]

So far.... I like

[xr4man]

the only thing i'm not sure about is that the case itself is quite rounded and the mods are very angular. i'm not sure how much i like that. but the work itself is awesome.

[biggoofy]

I'm really liking how you cut away half the case at an angle. Interested to see how this thing ends up. I also have a question about the Cooler Master competition. If I was modding an Xbox 360 case to put PC components into would that be in the scratch build category or in the tower mod one?
Thanks in advance and looking forward to an update.