PROJECT LOG Project R Unit

That mirror finish on that wood is impressive! I have yet to have the patience to do a good paint job. Hopefully my next one will actually be done right.

Looking forward to updates.

Getting back to lighting, I turned my attention to the back compartment, which will hold the psu and the hard drives.


I wanted to mount a CCFL here:









Again, tho, I ran into the blinding light problem. This time, however, there wasn’t enough clearance to mount a bracket to shade migrainous eyes.



So I pulled an old trick from the hat:





I took some split corrugated tubing—the kind used for cable management. I trimmed a little bit of lengthwise, then stuffed the inside with aluminum foil:










Slip it on:









And mount it back up:






Voila! The compartment is lit, but no blinding lights in your eyes. I’ll probably paint the cube ends of the CCLF.





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Looks great! It'll look even better once you get the inside painted as well. You'll be surprised how much less light will bounce back once you paint it a dark color.

Here is that back panel with it half open:











Next I did some small but necessary housekeeping items.




Added some brackets here to secure blank 5.25 fronts and short bay devices (green arrows):














And a couple of things up front.

Added a mounting plate (green arrow), mostly cosmetic.

Added a 2nd front CCFL (orange arrow).

At this point, I’ve almost completed everything on this project short of finish work (paint) and installing some hardware.



I did have 2 more items to complete before all the finish work:

1) Hard drive rack
2) Interior windows.



Hard drive rack was planned to go back here:






4 sets of hanging ribs (2 in front and 2 in back).










And I planned to insert 2 windowed panel here:





This mod would be purely for aesthetics. I felt this big pan at the base of the motherboard needed something to break it up. A pair of windows will peak into the lit chamber below.








HOWEVER, both of these remaining projects required me to break the station down to work on. Since I planned on going straight on to paint, that means this point here is the last time this project will be seen together until final assembly!




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So before disassembling this unit, I decided to take a bunch of pics, sort of as a teaser for the final build.


I also decided to do a little scouting around—this is my first project in my new house. So I’ve been looking around for a decent place to take some nice photographs of my completed projects.




And so I give you the almost completed still tentatively named, Project R Unit:








It’s got a mysterious sort of sleek yet curvy shape.

Lights and switches are all fully functioning. I’ve got a mockup DVD drive in there, but I will be using this fan controller.
















The left side sports the 2 120mm fan intakes as well as the 2 exhausts up top.
















The right side has 1 more exhaust fan, plus the i/o panel and pci slots, and the power supply:
















The back is a sheer plastic panel, plus 2 more slots for 5.25 bay devices:

















And now the fun stuff!






Hit the 3rd switch on the switch panel, and internal lights come on, highlighting my junk mockup motherboard!












Activate the hidden latch, and the front panel swings open under the action of pneumatic springs.












And some videos to demonstrate the lighting and panel access mechanisms:

















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Amazing work here Navig, I love this project. I really like the lighting effect, and the pneumatic door is cool too. Better with paint though

Dooms101 said:

Amazing work here Navig, I love this project. I really like the lighting effect, and the pneumatic door is cool too. Better with paint though

Click to expand...

Yeah, I hate to critique such an amazing build but some sort of paint or stain would really bring it together.

Tis coming. I will refer you to post 79.

I am going for a full custom automotive mirror gloss finish. I'm not just pointing a rattle can at it. The whole thing is getting disassembled down to the screw so that I can properly paint every bracket.

Truth is, currently I'm a week into paint, finishing up all my yellow painted items. My typical protocol is to

1) prep the items (roughing metal surfaces, bondo to fill holes)

2) Clean and dry

3) Mount item to a jig for handling

4) Lay down about 3 coats of primer separated by about 10 minutes each

5) Dry for 24 hours

6) Wet sand with 400

7) Dry and clean

8) Repeat steps #4 to #7 until sanding no longer reveals the primary surface and there are no low or hi spots (typically 3 iterations).

9) Remount it to jig to expose covered surfaces

10) Repeat steps #4 to #8

11) Switch to top color coat

12) Repeat steps #2 to #10 except with top coat

13) Switch to glossy clear coat

14) Repeat steps #2 to #10 except with clear coat

15) Finish top coat by wet sanding with 800 grit, 1000 grit, 1500 grit then 3m rubbing compound



So if your keeping track it would take roughly a week's intermittent work to take a single item from unfinished to full finish--altho I am doing them in batches.

Next I installed my hard drive system.


My plan was to have 2 sets of ribs to hang my drives off, roughly in this location:










I had already constructed my drive racks, back in post#43:



--> Post #43 <--



It consisted of 4 ribs, with brackets that attach to the drives, then slide onto the ribs:












The ribs will be mounted with a dowel pin to the side panel:












And the hard drives, mounted to the metal bracket, slide onto the ribs:














And here I have all 4 ribs roughly mounted up:

That HDD mounting is really cool, how well does it support the drives? It doesn't look too strong.

The ribs are held in by what is known in woodworking as a dowel pin joint.

This is a picture of the blocks that support the main hinges:







There is a fluted 1/4" pin that sits in a 1/4" hole spanning the joint. When glue is applied throughout the hole, the joint becomes extremely strong.







For additional support, I've circled 2 little items:







First, there is a L bracket on top of the rib to add extra support.

Second, there is a little block that the hard drive rests on, essentially taking most of the load off the rib.

2.5" drives will hang completely freely, fortunately 2.5" drives are really light.




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My last little feature was that I wanted to add some pass thru windows here:













This area under the motherboard was pretty barren, plus underneath are those nice LED light bars.







First I laid some things out with some plastic panels:














Then I cut the holes. And built some brackets to hold the plastic panels in place:









And it all goes together like so:




















And finally, I deconstructed my whole case:

Start:







Remove plastic panels:













Remove more panels and complicated wiring:










Back down to the basic structure:

















And finally, 3 boxes of parts:









On to paint...




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Looking great Navig, look forward to seeing it painted

Jolly-Swagman said:

Looking great Navig, look forward to seeing it painted

Click to expand...

+1 I've been waiting a while for this

Let's get Painting!




First project I tackled was to paint all my yellow components. Again I used Rustoleum Summer Squash satin finish.



I began with painting my fans. Normally I'm not a big fan of painting fans, as it will likely shorten its lifespan, but I'm going to sacrifice it for aesthetics. Also helps they are $3 Yate Loons.




Disassembled, cleaned, and rough sanded with some 220grit.






















If you've never disassembled a fan before, here is some basic standard bearing fan anatomy:








Peel back the and you will find then end of the drive axle poking out (in this case also under a rubber plug).

The white ring tab is what retains the axle in the shaft (besides the magnetic force). At first it may seem difficult to remove, but it has a split in thru the ring, so with some tweezers you can peel it out:






















After which the fan blade assembly with the axle will come right off.






Here I've put the tab back on to the axle so you can see how it works:




















2 careful coats of yellow paint, reassemble and voila:










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Sorry on the slowness of updates. The storms of northern California have wreaked havoc on our internet connection. Life without internet, gasp!

Also knocked down 5 of my 40+ft almond trees.

^Sry to hear about your trees. Btw those fans looks flawless, I wish I had the patience to do such quality work.

Thanks, I hate painting, but I want to do it right!






Next yellow item were my pci slot covers.



First step was to prep the covers--they were sanded past the hard external (presumably nickel) coating. You might think that since they are finished products that they would be nice and smooth and ready for primer, but that was so not true. There were so many sharp and rough edges.

And I cannot emphasize this enough! If you do not put in the effort into prepping you paint surfaces, it WILL come back and bite you in the buttock. A sharp rough edge will not let the primer adhere well. If the primer does not adhere well, then no matter how many beautiful base coats and top coats you put on there, the first time it rubs against something, the paint will crack off right down to bare metal. It WILL happen.



Also, take the time to thoughtfully mount up your pieces--for example by putting my slot covers like so, I could paint both sides at the same time.














Next, I sprayed primer:






How many coats of primer did I spray? I don't know, I don't keep track. What I do is I spray primer, let it dry until it is dry and not tacky, then I sanded it with 220 grit paper. Any sharp or rough edges, the primer would come off. Then I would hit these areas aggressively with a sander (Dremel rotary or Multimax). Then I would spray another coat of primer. Then sand again to make sure the primer would adhere.

Once the primer would not come away with sanding, then I progressed to base coat.


I put down maybe 3 coats of yellow squash base.


Then I sanded with 220 grit then 600 grit.


Then I top coated with glossy clear.



You may also notice in the pic above, there are a whole bunch of other little widgets I've been painting. When you've got so many different items to paint, you've really got to practice time management because prep may take 60 minutes, actual painting takes 10 minutes, then waiting for paint to dry takes 24 HOURS. So you try to parallel your work as much as you can keep track of or have surface area to dry!



And here you go:























Later on, I decided I wanted to secure my pci cover plates a little better than the one screw on one side.


This could potentially be a important note to anyone scratch building a case and using one of these pre-fab'd PCI brackets (I got mine from performance-pcs).












I simply took a bar of 1/4" wide, 1/8" thick bar and cut it to length. I then drilled and tapped 2 holes, with 1/8" standoffs. To the underside I used some foam strip. And painted the bar black. The bar holds down the pci slot covers, without scratching my nice paint job:

Looking good mate, you always have excellent workmanship!