Project - Air Cube v2

[Waynio]

Hi all, time for my imaginatively titled Air Cube v2 to get done sorry could not think of a good title so it is a spare of the moment title.

I got the flat bars and angle bars today of the aluminium, and I should have the sheets tomorrow. at last woohoo lol i'm a tad excited for my next modding fix.
The flat bars are 20mm wide by 3mm thick / angle bars are 12.7mm x 12.7mm x 1.58mm
the sheets are 1mm thick for components like any add on parts and cages and 1.5mm thick for top, mid, bottom, front, sides and back panels.

insert completed project pic here

Here is the new small 2-5mm hss countersink bit I just bought and these are the little m3 countersunk allen head bolts and half nuts, I'm hoping I will not need rivets at all for this so it can all be dismantled easily for painting and further mods.

Here is the main structure I will be making 1st of all which I hope will be strong, probably got over 30 120mm fans in bags lol, so 3 for the front instead of the 200mm fan this time so it will need to be about 30mm wider than planned but that can be a good thing for hdd wire space, 2 for the true, 1 at back and 1 in front of the hdd's.
I'll be swapping all the fans when I can afford to with the akasa apache 120mm fans as they are 57cfm at only 16db and are rated to last 50,000 hours so should make for a nice very quiet well air cooled case.

I'm going to have my 1st go on a drill press with this project and plan to use it quite a bit, hope it is as good as I imagine it would be, I'll be sure to very carefully do the measuring and marking and it should be fine I hope , lucky my dad is into motorbikes and has done a bit of restoration work on them so he has a few very useful tools to compliment the ones I have bought. He has a powerful air compressor that is outstanding for making a dust clogged pc look like brand new , still yet to get into using quality paint with a paint gun and air brush, annodising seems quite hazardous unless you really know what you are doing but I think it would be my prefered choice or I could just pollish it to a mirror finnish.

I'm very tired from over exercising every day for the past month I'm shattered lol so will start on the project in a couple of days when i'm a bit more sparky as long as the aluminium sheets come tomorrow.

So hopefully I will not bore you all any further and just post pics with as short as possible descriptions whenever I progress a bit further .

Compliments & pointers are very welcome if you think I'm doing a good job once I have some actual work in progress shots.

[Mark_Hardware]

lucky. I wish I had some of those tools

[blueonblack]

Drill presses are awesome. I had no idea how much I needed one until I got one. Wow. Best suggestion for those is a fence. You don't have to build a table or anything, you can clamp a board to the factory table. Even a fence like that will make the tool twice as useful.

Good luck on the project, will be looking for updates.

[Waynio]

Best suggestion for those is a fence

How do you mean a fence I'm baffled lol

Or is that what you meant

you can clamp a board to the factory table

[blueonblack]

Something like this:

http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/cta...emnumber=96395

Obviously by just clamping a board to the table you just get the vertical part of the setup above, but it's perfect for drilling multiple holes exactly the same distance from an edge, for example.

[Waynio]

Ahh I see how that would make it even better for what I want to do, thanks for the suggestion.

Did not get the aluminium sheets the next day and I'm expecting them today, it is now 2 weeks ago today when I made my aluminium order, they said the sheets got damaged in transit but still, 2 weeks, wish I paid a little extra for next day delivery I'll know for my next order .

[Waynio]

WooHooo Got the rest of the aluminium today and its all in perfect condition

Not quite prepared to start on it yet, but by friday I will.

[Waynio]

Thursday evening
Made a start & I measured & marked the 2m bars ready for cutting.

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Friday mid day
Only got all the bars cut to size with a hacksaw with 1 slightly wrong, good thing I bought a little extra for if I mess up made another 1 and here is how it will be going together.

Was really getting stuck into it but was getting aggravated quite easily so I called it a day as I figured I'd end up making a pile of mistakes with not being nice and calm .

Received 1 akasa apache fan in the post, tried it out & it is nice and quiet with very good air flow for an almost silent fan so I'll be ordering another 6 close to the case being complete, then I'll have to do something about my enermax galaxy to use a quieter fan setup.

---

Saturday morning
Very late start at 15:00 lazy day
overlapped the bottom angle bar pieces and marked the bits that needed to be removed so the angles slot together for a flush connection, hacksaw and file used.
Here is one of the angle ends which I cut and filed.

here is the lowest base loosely fitted together

here is the 1.5mm thick sheet snugly fit inside the frame with little angle bars which will support the corner angle bars, I'm happy with how its going so far but kind of dreading the drilling I'll be doing tomorrow lol, as you can see I'm going to have to get through 3 layers precisely or it will mess up, but I'm hoping to at least get this bottom base complete and bolted together tomorrow.

1 more thing, the camera I'm using olympus fe-170 6mp, I have noticed it is giving a fish bowl look about it as some parts look slightly curved, but the actual bars are definately straight, pretty strange .

[Waynio]

Did not wake up til 15:00 because of watching ufc 100 in the early hours .

Did want to start early today so Made no progress on the case, but made a fence from a shelf that my dad had lying around and now I can see how useful it will be, the drilling will be 100% more easier now, thank you blue for recomending a fence .

[Waynio]

This is the progress made today.
The bottom panel was easy to drill with the fence I made, it was the little corner bits that was hard to pull off while keeping it all square but got there in the end phew , I am considering countersunk rivets instead of the little nuts & bolts in some areas like the corners for extra sturdyness , but they will do for now as I can dismantle and rebuild whenever needed, but I'm definatley using the nuts & bolts for the front & top panel.
The countersink bit was well worth getting for the nice flush fittings, I'll probably turn all the bolts the other way round on the bottom panel so its all flush inside and add some nice big custom case feet underneath.

Building from the ground up so could be made shorter when I get to that point.

The corner bits were tricky to pull off, they would be better riveted for extra strength.

Underneath, the base is really sturdy .