Coolermaster elite 120 - Pob's mini review

[Pob255]

I've not done a full review or set of photos yet, I've been too busy building a system in it
This first post is more my initial impressions and thoughts and a couple of points to highlight about this case

Too start off with this is what I'm going to be looking at

The new Cooler Master elite 120 advanced (no idea if they plan to do another version or why they added the "advanced" suffix to the model name)
I'm also going to look at the Huntkey Jumper 300G in passing, I was originally originally planning to use it in this case but I've since changed my mind about it, more on this later.


Initial first impressions out of the box, I really like it.
Comparing it to a Shuttle SH61R4, which I've used in a past build, it's slightly wider and a bit longer, not anodised aluminium but the paint finish is good and the steel construction is reflected in the cheap price.
The front bezel is lovely a thin sheet of grey anodised brushed aluminium is stuck onto the front and onto the 5.25" bay cover gives it a really nice touch.
The bezel is a matte plastic which is quite thick (varying between 2-3mm), ridged and solid feeling, which is excellent as removing the bezel is just a grab and pull it off type, I've ripped it off a dozen times now and it's not been damaged in any way.
My only negative points on the bezel are both really minor, I'd of preferred the cooler master logo to be less obvious, instead of a holographic sticker in the middle of the aluminium I've of preferred a more subtle logo formed into the plastic
eg like the way cooler master does it on the blade master fans

My other minor niggle about it is the aluminium 5.25" cover, not the cover it self, it's lovely, just a shame you have to remove it to fit an optical drive, if they had used a flip down cover it would of been great.

Now I'm going to skip over a bit here like the overall structure and layout, I'll probably come back to these later, I will mention that the whole thing has a really solid feel, I'm guessing 0.7mm steel from the feel of it but it might be less and cleverly constructed, but the single piece top/side panel, bottom panel and rear panel all feel more ridged than 0.6mm steel, there's a little flex on the sides if you push on them but not much.

There's an instruction manual, well it's a sheet, but it's a nice addition and does explain some of the features and how to use them quite well, eg cable management, it highlights all the cable tie down points
There's a bag of your fairly standard bits, ie a load of black screws, some cable ties, a little plug in pc speaker and these

I was a little puzzeled over the black things, so checked the manual, they where just called "rivets" then it showed a picture of using them to mount a fan on the inside of the drive cage, these plastic rivets make a lot of sense as you cannot get a screw driver to the inside of the drive cage to use normal screws although using the same long screws that are used to hold in the front fan would of been preferable.
The other thing in that photo is four brass motherboard standoff's, what's special about them? nothing other to note that they are not prefitted but what is special is the little hex wrench you get to screw them in with, this has a cross point slot on the other side so you use it with a normal screwdriver to screw the standoff's in.
That's a really nice little extra I've not seen before.

Back to the outer panel, this is one of my criticisms of this case.

Here you can see a shot of the top vent with it's "filter" now as you can see from this the vent holes are not that large, the raito of the area of hole to surface is about 40:60
To give you a better idea for that, round hole honeycomb modders mesh is about 60:40 and Hex honeycomb modders mesh is about 80:20
So these vents are not going to be the best in terms of air flow, it should still be reasonable and on my test build I can feel a lot of air getting pulled through, but I think they are restricting the air a bit and adding to the noise (more on this later)

My next criticisms is that filter.
It is a plastic sheet (about as thick and stiff as thin card) and a punched round hole honeycomb, so the ratio or hole to surface is good for air flow, what's not so good is that the holes are ~3mm in diameter, which means I cannot see that really stopping anything much in the way of dust.
So the only filter in the whole case really doesn't look like it's up to the job of filtering.

Here's an out of focus (sorry) photo with a penny to give you a better idea of scale

The vents on the sides while they are identical is slots to the top vent are unfiltered but as it stands I'm loathed to count that top vent as "filtered" ether

On the positive side that top vent is really only for the psu (although it's larger than a psu so some air from inside the case can get out that way) the main intake is the front fan and while there's no filter on it it would be very simple to fit a standard 120mm fan filter to it.

However the 120mm front fan is not the only intake fan

note, I had to play with the level in this photo to make it clear so it's more grey than it actually is
Now I'll admit I'm really puzzled as to cooler master's thinking behind this, not the fan it self, the idea there is sort of obvious a fan next to the motherboard to bring in cool air to the cpu/vrm/chipset area, fine.
But why an 80x80x15mm fan?
You can see from the photo the mounting is a simple metal frame that's held in with screws on the bottom and rear of the case, so you can easily remove it if you don't want it, what baffles me is that they put it 22mm in from the side of the case, which means they could use a standard 25mm thick fan so had to go with a 15mm thick fan instead, to make things worse the distance between the motherboard and the side of the case is 28mm so there should be space to of moved it in 3mm and put a standard 80mm fan rather than this half thickness fan.
Which would of been good because this fan is a bit noisy. (but that's getting a little ahead of myself)

Now I'm going to skip a head again to a working build

This is not the final build, it's just a rough test build, no cable management, just all the bits stuck into the case to give me a rough idea of what the later full build will be like, what's good, what's bad and give me ideas as to what I need to change or adapt or mod to get around issues.

Overall building in the case is lovely, it's all nice an open, it's easy to get to stuff, cable tie down points all in the right place, the front panel connectors are a little long for the case, however that gives you a bit more flexibility in cable routes without being excessive.
The rails for mounting the hard drives cooler master uses are the best for anti-vibration but they hold the drives securely and the rails are very slightly longer than the hole spacing on a hard drive (0.2-0.1mm) this is actually a good thing, you flex the rail slightly to fit it to the side of the hard drive and then it grips the drive so it doesn't fall off but you can still pull it off with ease.
This isn't new for cooler master, it's their standard system, it works great and you don't have to worry about a rail falling off the drive while you slot it in.
When you remove the bezel all the buttons and connectors are mounted to the front of the frame not the inside of the bezel (as most cheap cases do) so once the bezel is removed it's totally separate, also you can remove and refit it with the optical drive in place (which you cannot on some cases as the case bezel will catch on the optical drive bezel)
Fitting the psu is interesting, I'd advise to do it last, what I did was to remove the bracket, fit it to the psu, feed the cables in through the hole in the back, connect them up, then finally slot the psu into the case, this worked well.
Cable managing a non-modular psu like this one could be a bit tricky, esp if you want to get it out again, so I'd advise releasable cable ties, actually I'd go with releasable beaded cable ties http://ziptieguy.wordpress.com/2011/...es-cable-ties/ for the psu cables

EDIT:One thing I forgot to mention CPU cooler clearance once the PSU is installed looks to be around 70mm

So overall the build went great . . . then I turned it on

Ok a bit over dramatic but one thing this isn't is silent I took me a bit of time to trace exactly what the worst sound offenders where, for a reason.
Now without the bezel or panel on there was a ticking coming from the front fan, an air flow wooshing from the 80mm side fan and the huntkey psu is making a bit of noise, more than an intel c2d stock cooler at idle but not much more.
When I stick the bezel and panel cover on the ticking from the front fan is greatly reduced but the sound from the psu and side fan increased, I put this down to air turbulence as the volume of air is sucked in through the vents, both the 80mm fan and the hunkey psu move a heck of a lot of air considering one is a 80x15mm fan and the other is a psu.
The noise is a whooshing sound, not massively loud but far from a silent case and definitely something I need to look at.

On the huntkey jumper 300G which I said I'd mention in passing, as I've just mentioned, it's not a silent psu the fan run quite fast for a psu and this is when the system is idle (I also noticed it when it just had the fan attached and nothing else) and it does draw in and kick out a heck of a lot of air, most silent/very quiet psu's drop the fan speed to around 600rpm idle, from the amount of air and the noise I'd guess it's around 1200rpm, I've not really stressed it yet but I've not noticed any change in the fan speed ether.
And that is the only down side I've yet to find with it, yes ok it's not modular, but for me modular cables are an added extra not a standard.
You could say that it's got a glossy black paint job but the picture on the outside of the box shows a brushed finish as a negative, given the choice the box picture looks much nicer but the glossy black finish isn't bad ether.
The sleeving is really nice, it's a softer less plasticy feeling sleeving, which you don't see that much esp on low cost units, enermax sleeving is still the best I've seen I just wished they sleeved the whole cable rather than stopping so short, all the sleeves are cable tied then shrink wrapped.
And remember this is a 80plus Gold certified 300w psu for just £39 which makes it the cheapest Gold certified on the market.
All told I'm actually really pleased with it, however I think I will replace it for my final mini-itx build, simply because I've got an enermax modular psu which I think would be better for this case and the enermax leads are actually slightly shorter.

[Pob255]

I've done a spot of fan testing now, removed from the case the 80x15mm fan is actually impressively quiet, it's not silent it's got a slight high pitched whine to it.
The metal bracket adds a bit of noise to it, the bracket isn't a single 80mm hole but has a cross bar which is obviously designed to match the fan frame but does not line up exactly, cutting that out should remove any noise from it.
The big issue is the vents in the cover panel, when you put the fan close to it (or any fan) you start getting a whooshing noise from the air being drawn in.
I've double checked it with a 92mm antec tri cool as it's easy to change the speed on that fan and yes the whooshing noise increases with the increase in fan speed.
As a test I added in one of the zalman rc100 Resistor Cable (the 5v one not the 7v one) which massively dropped the noise although it also dropped the air flow.

I think this has answered the question of why cooler master used a 15mm thick fan, to put a bit of gap between the vent and fan to mitigate the noise slightly, although I think a better air vent would of been a better option.

I do believe some modding is in order

[Pob255]

First mod


I cut the cross frame bit on the 80mm fan mount out as I found that was causing some additional noise.

I then rebuilt the pc with a few changes
- enermax modular psu
- replaced front 120mm fan with an amber led fan and silverstone filter (the extra width it added meant the bolts only just fit)
- flipped the 80mm fan over so it's now an exhaust fan, I'm not sure why this reduces the noise generated by air passing through the side panel vent but it does and it's the air passing through the vent that's making the majority of the noise from this fan not the fan itself.
- Test fitted my gtx260 just to see how well a large graphics card would fit.
- did some cable management

Here's the resulting build






Still not silent but is better in terms of less noise, the LED fan makes quite a nice and subtle effect as the fan is directly covered by the aluminium square on the bezel so you only get some light leaking from the vents around it.

The rest of the build is
2x 80gb HDD (only one is plugged in as this motherboard only has 2 sata ports)
1x DVDr/w
Zotac nvidia 9300 motherboard
Core2Duo E7200 2.53ghz & stock cooler
1x2gb ddr2 pc2-6400 (cannot use 2 sticks as one slot on the motherboard is damaged)

Plans for later mods:
- removal of the vents, just cutting them out to leave large holes
- filtering added to all the modded vents
Basically I'll cut out the vents and insert some very fine steel mesh I've got, that should allow air through without adding too much turbulence noise and act a a good dust filter.
I've also got some short SATA cables and an eSATA to SATA cable on order so I'll be able to hook up all 3 drives

[Biscuit]

Haha, that's the 260 ssc I sold you ages ago isn't it?

Nice review though, had my eye on this case as a potential for building for other people so this should make a good reference.

[phill8800GT]

How do you guys manage to fit anything in those cases!?!

[Pob255]

Haha, that's the 260 ssc I sold you ages ago isn't it?

Nice review though, had my eye on this case as a potential for building for other people so this should make a good reference.

Yep it is in deed, I've actually got it up on my for sale thread atm, lovely card and served me well, almost hate to sell it, I've kept hold of it for a while just as a back up in case my gxt560ti died.

How do you guys manage to fit anything in those cases!?!

It's actually easier than you might think, that one thing I really love about this case, it's so open when you're actually building in it, I've had more hassle in small ATX cases than I have in this one, esp getting the motherboard screws in.
The other thing I love about it is the way the layout is designed to be able to pack so much stuff into such a small space.
It does make it a bit like a puzzle box in that you have to remove bits in a fixed order, so if I wanted to replace the cpu cooler (something I'm looking at doing) I'd have to remove the psu, then the graphics card (if one was fitted) before I could really get to the motherboard.
The only real exception is the hard drives and optical drive which both have easy direct access.

[phill8800GT]

I struggled with my Danger Den double wide cases and they where the Extended models too!! Trust me, I'll struggle even more!

[Pob255]

I struggled with my Danger Den double wide cases and they where the Extended models too!! Trust me, I'll struggle even more!

Actually I can see that being a bit of a struggle, simply because it's sooo big and there's so many ways you can and cannot run wires in it.

I find the smaller the case the more important it is to cable manage as you go, not leave it until the end.
eg I've fitted the original front fan inside on the other side of the drive cage now, it would be really really tricky to try to try to tie cables down in the space between the motherboard and drive cage now this fan is in place, so you'd have to fit the motherboard and run the front panel cables before you fit a fan here.

Update:
I can now confirm that the Akasa 975CU http://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?t...model=AK-975CU doesn't quite fit I picked up one cheap off fleabay it's about 1 or 2mm too tall (also it's about 74mm not 76mm tall)
This case seem to have roughly 72mm cpu clearance off the top of the cpu.
However looking at the cooler, I should be able to trim a couple of mm off the top of the fins and make a new mounting bracket for the fan and then it should fit.
On this motherboard it should be ideal as the cooler will be aligned with both the side fan and the chipset heatsink

I've got a couple of bits of acrylic laser cut to go over the vents, so now I'll be able to cut them out and replace them with some fine wire mesh.

So expect some updates before the weekend

[phill8800GT]

Well I look forward to seeing how you manage it!!

[Pob255]

Well I look forward to seeing how you manage it!!

Well the very next day after I said I'd have stuff up before the weekend Real Life reared it's ugly head
I have managed to get some modding done, just didn't manage to finish it or upload the photo's in time (and I'm sorry but I didn't take many in the modding process)

Still here we go.

Step 1 - Modding fuel


A vital step in any modding, today it's espresso coffee and blueberry doughnut (gregs do some great doughnuts)

All fuelled up we can move onto . . .

Step 2 - CPU cooler

As I mentioned before, I've picked up an akasa 975CU off fleabay, it was about £7 inc P&P
I forgot to take a photo of it unmodded so here's a stock one from the akasa website

note: the 975CU is socket 775 only, the CCE-7201CP is the same cooler it just includes mounting kit for multiple sockets.


With the fan removed (4 small screws hold the bracket onto the cooler) I can mark out with tape the amount I need to trim off the top to make it fit.
I'm trimming off about 2-3mm here, so annoying that so little is blocking it from fitting as stock.


I get my rotary tool out and start cutting.
As you can see from this there's a slight problem with trying to cut the top off off a cooler with a rotary tool, due to the relatively small discs you can only cut so far in. :/

Something I discovered here, the cutting is easy because while the cooler is large there's not much actual material, the fins are very thin and it's mainly air, so I swapped from my normal mesh reinforced discs to my diamond cutting disc.
Normally I don't use the diamond disc's I've found them rubbish for cutting steel, they are very strong (it's a very thin metal disc impregnated with diamond dust) however they are just terrible at cutting steel.
About the only use I have for these is cutting acrylic because they are so thin.

Now I swapped over to the diamond disc because they are so thin so I hoped I could get into it at an angle ok, I couldn't however I did discover something, they really chew through aluminium.
The normal carbide discs do cut aluminium but it causes them to ware down far faster than steel does.

This got me thinking about cutting aluminium in the past and I remembered that I found a hack saw worked far better than the rotary tool . . . Hack saw, there's the answer to cutting out the middle.
If I ever have to cut down a cooler again then I'll go straight to the hacksaw and not bother with the rotary tool at all.
Also the rotary tool causes the whole thing to heat up, heat pipes definitely work, hack saw doesn't

At the end it was a bit rough and had a lot of burrs from the rotary tool, so I sanded it down by just rubbing it across some emery paper.

Here's the final result

Ok far from flat but it's good enough with no sharp edges or burrs now.
The fins at the end got bent but careful work with some tweezers sorted that out.
You can see at the bottom of the fan frame how little I've hacked off.

And now I realise I forgot photo's on the final stage, after I bent the fins back into place, I wanted to reseal the top which I did by simply using UHU glue, run the glue along the tops of the fins, smush it around with a finger and hang it upside down to dry.
If you do this be careful the glue doesn't drip down between the fins as coating them in glue is going to ruin the heat dissipation and use a glue that can take heat.

I was wondering how I would reattach the fan, was pondering drilling holes in the side of the frame and fins, then screwing it on. Then I thought "Nuts to that!" and I just glued that on as well.
Nice and easy

Step 3 - More Cutting


Time to get rid of those bad vents (work on those vents in the next version CoolerMaster)


Some of you might of noticed those holes don't match the markings I did, that's because I've had some acrylic frames laser cut the markings where the inside holes, so I had to make the cuts larger than the markings.
I cut them depending on the existing vent shape to reduce the total cutting, I've realised I, could of and should of, made the acrylic frames on the side bigger.
Also why I've not worried about being too neat, it's all going to be covered over.

I've only made on of these frame up so far, hopefully I'll get the other two done today and I'll do a full step by step as a sort of Pob's advanced fan filter guide.

Here's the result

That's the under side btw
What I've got is:
Square frame with rounded corners, laser cut from 3mm thick black acrylic
In the middle, stainless steel mesh, #30 (30 holes per linear inch or 900 per square inch) wire diameter is 0.20mm, hole size is 0.65mm and the hole area is 58%, this is just glued in place with UHU
Around the edged of that I glued on some bitumen insulation tape with Shoe Goo rubber adhesive, cutting out 6 small holes for the
Six 5mm x 5mm x 1mm Neodymium Magnets (fleabay) glued on with UHU

I had originally thought to glue on the mesh, then use the rotary tool to carefully carve out 6 depressions to fit the magnets in, then I remembered my bitumen tape, I checked it and yes it's 1mm thick and decided to use that as it's far more simple and one extra mm isn't too much to add.
I've currently got it stuck to the side of the cover to test, the magnets are holding it on very nicely, and it's not slipping down at all.
I've used the magnets so it's easy to remove for cleaning, I might add a couple of screws to the side filters to help with alignment when putting it on.

I've done a better close up of the original filter and the mesh so you can see the difference in just the filters

That's going to be far better for catching dust while still allowing air through.

My next stage will be a more detailed step-by-step guide as I make the side filters up . . . if real life doesn't get in the way again.

Oh and this has taken me a little while to type up as just as I started it we had a big thunder storm, which was right overhead, so I kept getting distracted trying to watch the lightning

[Biscuit]

i think the bumps on the cooler look alright, quite an impressive finish tbh!

Where do you get your mesh and stuff from?

[phill8800GT]

Looking very good so far

[Pob255]

Thanks guys.
Progression has been a bit slow, I've still got one filter left to make up, however I have taken a while to do a full step-by-step and at the same time I did some experimenting for the best construction method.
So here goes.

Pob's advanced Dust Filter.

Materials used

Going from left to right
- Laser cut 3mm thick black acrylic, from a local place, HAMAR http://www.hamaracrylic.co.uk/ yes it would of been cheaper for me to buy some and cut it myself but I was being a bit lazy and it's quiet a bit of work get the same results by hand.
- Inside the frame is a roll of black bitumen rubber insulation tape, I got this off ebay a while back but it's was too thick for my original plans so had it kicking about and it's proved ideal
- Next is a cut section of stainless steel mesh, #30 (30 holes per linear inch or 900 per square inch) wire diameter is 0.20mm, hole size is 0.65mm and the hole area is 58%, I got a big roll of this from ebay from the mesh company http://stores.ebay.co.uk/MeshCompany They do woven metal mesh from really big stuff down to some super fine stuff. The hole size here is smaller than most mesh screen pc filters you get, which are around 1mm hole size but they do tend to have higher hole area because the mesh fibres are about the same size.
- On top of the mesh at the top is a stack of 5mm x 5mm x 1mm Neodymium Magnets which again I picked up off ebay a while back, shop around and if you don't mind the wait you can get them from hongkong or chinese sellers in quite large packs cheaply.
- Below the magnets (still on top of the mesh) is a pair of tin snips I borrowed from work, you can use scissors to cut this mesh, but it's not easy and you damage the scissors (as I found out) the tin snips are much better.
- To the right of that is a large tube of UHU glue, ebay, don't get the solvent free UHU because that's just expensive PVA glue, the basic stuff is great, it's clear, it takes a bit of time to dry (not super fast like super glue) so it still give you some working time, the end result is clear and slightly rubbery, it's also heat and water resistant.
- Finally on the far right a big tube of Shoe Goo, ebay, most skaters will be familiar with this stuff, it's a multi purpose rubber shoe glue, commonly used by skaters to repair converse, not only can you use it to stick fabric back to rubber but also to repair rubber and even as a filler to fill holes in rubber soles.

These are the main bits, there are some other bits which I realised I missed so I've covered them as I went.

Step 1 - prep the acrylic

When you get acrylic it'll be covered on both sides by a plastic or paper sheet to protect the surface, you need to peel off the inside sheet, leave the other sheet on so as not the scratch up the outside.

And here we also have the first tool I forgot, number1 emery paper, I'm not sure what that is in grit, it's fairly rough, probably around 100grit or you could just use some fine sand paper

These side frames are 280mm wide by 120mm tall and 15mm across, with 5mm curves at the corners, so the inside hole is 250mm by 90mm by the way.

Now what we want to do here is to key the surface, the nice glassy smooth surface of the acrylic might look good but it's not good for glue as there's not much for the glue to stick to, so we sand it not to smooth it but to roughen it and break up that glassy finish.


One keyed surface

Step 2 - cutting the mesh to size.
I've sort of skipped this step a bit, mainly because I did this a couple of days ago well before I started putting these together.
I did try to get a couple of shots on a scrap piece to illustrate the problems I encountered, however they didn't come out well, this stuff is very hard to get the camera to focus on correctly.
Now I've already mentioned in the tool&materials, that you can use scissors but tin snips are better to cut it however even with tin snips there are issues.
It's easy to cut this stuff square as long as you follow the weave and cut in a straight line, go slow, cut in short bites it's fine.
However the moment you cut diagonally across the weave the cutters snag and foul, twisting and distorting the weave rather than cutting cleanly.
This does limit you to square and rectangular shapes, so what if you want something that's not square?
Well here the good old rotary tool comes into play, when I tried to cut a large chunk out of my large roll, to cut down into these 3 filters, I was using scissors, this is when I found the issue with with mesh not cutting well with scissors.
Not only did it damage the scissors blades (they've got kicks in them now) I was having trouble keeping the cut straight, causing a lot of fouling and some foul language.
I managed it but one corner wasn't very square, so as a test I tried my rotary tool on it and found it cuts it quite well.

Another factor to be aware of is because this is just a woven mesh there's a minimum thickness, if you tried to cut a very thin strip less than 5 threads wide then the threads running across will just fall out and you'll be left with a bunch of twisted wires not a mesh.

The size of the mesh, you want to cut the mesh larger than the internal hole of the frame as you'll be glueing it in, I cut mine roughly 9mm wider and longer than the hole giving me roughly 4-5mm overlap on each side.

Step 3 - glue on the mesh.
Before we get into the glueing a big warning, do NOT ware good cloths when doing this, both UHU and Shoe Goo are water proof solvent based glues so if you get it into clothing it'll not come out easily, heck shoe goo is also used to make water proof rubberised fabrics.
You will get both of these on your fingers, nether washes off, but don't panic, both are similar it that they slowly become rubbery at which point they are easy to peel or rub off skin (but not fabric)
I would advise peeling and rubbing it off your fingers, I'm not sure how they'd react together before set but don't want sticky fingers when trying to align and place stuff down, last thing you want is something sticking to your finger slightly so you keep pulling it out of alignment.


Apply the UHU around the inner edge of the frame


Then align and press down the mesh, go around the whole edge to make sure it's all pressed down, it's also worth going over the mesh first just gently bend it if it's not flat, until it is flat.
Leave it for a minute, so the UHU will be more tacky and press it down a 2nd time to make sure the mesh is fully stuck down and not lifted any place.

Leave it for 10-20min to set some more before glueing the next part, however go around the edges with a knife to cut and peel off any large blobs of glue on the frame not covered by the mesh.
Also be careful of getting glue onto the mesh over the open area, you don't want to block up your filter with glue.

Step 4 - the insulation tape

I plan to put the magnets on the long sides so I started by cutting two strips of tape for the short sides.

And here we have the rest of the missing tools, a stanly knife, a ruler, a pen and a bit of scrap clear acrylic I've been using as a cutting board, any clean flat surface you don't mind cutting into will be fine.

One thing to note about the insulation tape, one side is covered by a textured plastic sheet, this is there to stop the tape sticking or melting to itself while in a roll, this is handy as I can leave it tape side up while working with it, so it'll not matter if I get glue over it and only peel it off at the end.


Here I've had to cut the tape down, this is because the is 18mm wide, the frame is 15mm across and about 5mm is taken up by the mesh overlap, so I've had to trim the tape to 10mm width.

Glue test 1

This is how I made the first frame, I put the Shoe Goo on the tape, then pressed it down.
I could of used UHU here, however I've used shoe goo as 1 I had it and 2 it should bond to the tape better than UHU does.
sorry it's not easy to see as the shoe goo is black as is the tape and so is the acrylic.

Glue test 2

For the other end I tried putting the glue on the acrylic rather than the tape.

Of the two methods I think the 2nd one is slightly better, on this size of shoe goo tube the opening is quiet large and the glue is very goopy and quite sticky so it's easier to squeeze it out onto the ridged frame than the flexible tape.
It might be a good idea to spread the shoe goo out, I didn't have anything to hand when doing these tests, as I found that it's so thick that as I pressed the tape down and the glue slowly spread out the tape had the habit of riding the glue sideways and going out of alignment. It was easy to realign it as shoe goo has quite a long working time (ie the time while it's still fluid enough to work with before you should leave it to set.)

Again remember to be careful not to get glue onto the mesh over the open area, you don't want to block up your filter with glue.


Now with both ends glued on I could leave that to dry for a little while while I worked on the long sides.
It edges have a bit of leaked out glue and the corners are square but they can be trimmed at the end.

Glue test 3 the long sides

The long sides are a little more complex as I had to cut out some small 5mm squares out of one side of the tape, these holes will be for the magnets to sit in, it's far easier to cut them now than later after the strip is glued down as I want them as flat and level as possible for the magnets to sit in flush.
By making the frame 15mm across, leaving 5mm for the mesh means that I can cut 5mm into the inner side of the tape so that the magnets will be right in the middle of the frame.
See there is some planning here, I'm not just picking random sizes as I go.

You can also see from the large overhang from the bottom strip of tape that I tried another test here, I didn't cut this strip of tape down to 10mm I just stuck it down, glue on acrylic, and will then trim it down once it's dried.
My though behind this was because I'm getting some glue seepage I'll need to go over the edges anyway, so it should be possible to skip the initial trimming stage and just trim it all at the end.
This might still work, however this first test was a failier, because I couldn't tell how well the glue had spread and when I came to trim it I discovered the edge wasn't glued down, so I had to lift the edge carefully to work some more glue in with a pin.
It might work better this way if I went back to putting the glue on the tape and using something to spread it out, however this will end up with sections of tape with glue on them sticking out and I can see it all getting a bit messy.

Step 5 - Trim and first clean up.
With all the tape down I left it for about 15min for the shoe goo to set a bit.
I then carefully trimmed around the edges of the frame (this is when I realised my final test needed more glue) I used both scissors and stanley knife.
I then used the stanley knife on the magnet holes, I ran it around the edge of the tape to cut off leaked shoe goo, then carefully pealed it out the leave the holes clear.

Step 6 - Magnets

With the holes clear of excess shoe goo, I put a blob of UHU in each hole, dropped in a magnet and pressed it down.
These magnet all have a north and south pole, with each flat side being one or other, my plan was to put them in all the same way round.
However I have just realised I've made a mistake and I've actually put them in north, south, north, south.
It's easy to check when laid flat side by side, if they are the same way up they'll repel, if they are opposite way up they'll stick edges together. (I got that round the wrong way when sticking them in.)
In all honesty I'm not sure if it really makes any difference (something to test tomorrow) as 8 of these magnets in alternate pole orientation is holding this filter one without issue.
I only used 6 on the top filter as it's smaller and lighter as well as being on top so gravity will not be an issue as it will be on these side filters.

As a test I stuck it on the side, with part of it not on, so only 6 magnets are holding it and while it's enough to keep it in place against gravity, it doesn't take much force to knock in down and 4 isn't enough to hold it up, so it looks like I got it spot on with 8.
Thinking about it as the most mass is in the frame and mesh, I could of tested this by seeing how many it would take to just hang the frame and mess, then add a couple extra for safety.

One thing to note, stacking two of these magnets on top of each other does seem to increase the overall hold and a hole stack of them make for a very strong magnet.

And here is the final result on the elite 120

Ok not quite the final result as the outer protective film is still on the acrylic, but I'm leaving than on as I may be drilling a couple of holes in it so I can put some screws in to act as location guides.

My idea here is simple, I drill a 3mm hole in the middle of each short end, tap it so I can then screw in an M3 screw (that's the smaller screw you use for floppy and optical disc drives)
then in the case I'll drill a 4mm hole in the corresponding location of the case cover.
This way the screws will not screw into the case and the filter will still be held on by the magnets but they will act as guide pegs so the filter will go back in the same place after it's been removed for cleaning.

[phill8800GT]

Very nice indeed I can't wait to see more!!

[Ciber]

Good review, thanks!