Project - Dichotomy (Finished)

[Pob255]

This is a mod build I did nearly 2 years ago, it was only on modbrothers, but as that's now gone down I'm going to try to rebuild it here.
Yes the case is finished, it came out great and is still working well.



Following on from my original design work (I'll post it if I can recover it)
Yes I've finally come up with a name for it. The division of two opposites that form a whole, I think it's an ideal name for a black and white colour scheme build.

I was asked to build a pc by a lady at work, max budget £350, complete system.

Yes yet again I'm working to a very tight budget :? one of these days someone with a load of money will ask me to put a pc together, that or I'll win the lottery.

Well I could of just bought some cheap case to put it in, but where's the fun in that? This is a good excuse to practise my modding and she'll get a one of a kind case.
I've been bargain hunting and trolling 2nd hand sources for components, all the hard ware has cost about £290, leaveing me with £60 for the case, again could get a decent case for that, but again that's no fun.

Now to help shave off the costs (this was before I managed to get all the hardware) I picked up a couple of old chieftech mini-tower cases from work for nothing (I diverted them from their journey to the skip)

They are great little case, and I mean little, smaller than most mATX cases and very solid construction, I've happily stood on these cases before with out doing any damage to them.

Here it is, a lovely beige canvas (sorry these where taken with my phone, so not the best of photos)




That's a 30cm/12inch ruler and a 140mm wire mesh filter on the top, gives you an idea of the size.

I've been working on this case on and off for a couple of weeks so there's a load more to come, however right now it's late and I need to go to sleep.

So here's the plan:
Throw away the front bezel, it's badly yellowed and rather ugly, build a whole new front bezel, I want something simple and elegant.
Cut holes for new fans, 120mm front & 92mm rear (couldn't fit a 120mm in the rear slightly too narrow)
Convert the single piece U shaped side&top panel into 3 separate panels.
New hard drive mounting.
Add air filters
Cut additional cable management holes
Repaint, colour scheme is glossy white with black accents.
Colour match keyboard, mouse, speakers and monitor
Stay within budget!
Don't make a total pigs ear of it!

More to come soon.

[Pob255]

Well work is progressing and I've uploaded the photos so here goes.

Two Fridays back I dropped off the old case at my parents house and arranged to visit them on Tuesday so I could spend the day in my fathers workshop.
As the only space I have for modding back at my flat is the balcony and there's just not enough room there to cut up a big sheet of MDF, also I don't have a jig saw, just my slowly failing "Workshop" brand rotary tool. (the speed control is going so it's very hard to get it to stay at any speed other than it's slowest)
My father does have a couple of good jigsaws and a nice big shed/workshop to work in.

I was planning to use the jigsaw to cut up the U panel into separate top, left side and right side panels, and cut up a sheet of MDF to make the replacement front bezel.

Here is the workshop

As you can see when I went round on Tuesday I discovered, he'd been busy over the weekend but still found time to cut up the panel, he knew I wanted to do that myself
Oh well, as his skills with a jig saw are far better than mine I'm not going to complain too much.


Nicely done right along the edge.


He also cut the air vent in the top for the PSU (the PSU in there is one of the Chieftec shorter than normal ATX psu's that are made for this case, I'm going to be putting a Corsair CX400w in there) my own fault for leaving the filter that's going over that with him. (you can see where my modding and tinkering comes from )

So we popped round to Wicks to pick up a sheet of MDF

About (well the metric equivalent) 8 foot by 4 Foot by 12mm thick, I'm going to cut a bit off the end, then cut out two sections and sandwich them together to make a 24mm thick bezel, this will have another 5mm of acrylic on the front of that.


Not exactly straight

This section is going to be front of the bezel, so I carefully marked it up for the chunks that will need to be cut out

In this photo the section to the left will be for the 140mm filter and the section to the right will be for the 5.25" bays (one DVDrw, one Akasa All-in-one), already drilled holes for the jig saw.

In the middle between the two holes I'm going to put the power button, however money is tight so I couldn't afford the nice vandal switch I had in mind, so I ended up with a chunky plastic button from maplin

This but all in black, round button square frame.

Now the thread on this is not long enough to fit over the full 12mm thickness so,

Started off by drilling a pilot hole, then used a 25mm frostner bit on the back, cut down about 5mm, and finally went all the way through from the front with a 15mm frostner bit, one switch hole done.

Now it was time to attack it with the jig saw.

Sorry not a very good photo here, I didn't realise it was this bad until later and I was too busy cutting up mdf to remember to take more photos.
Actually that's one thing about modding, you need two hands for the power tool and a third for a camera, need to mod a hat so I can attach a camera to it.

For the 2nd section I just cut out the whole middle section.

Much wobbly cutting later, my jig saw skills leave much to be desired, I keep drifting to the right.


You can also see I had a bit of trouble with the curves at the corners of the filter hole.

Two parts to sandwich together to make a bezel, which is of course the next stage.

[Pob255]

Oh bum
I've been pulling this from the google cache, but they've not got a cache of page 3, pages 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 but not page 3

I can go back through all the photos to find out which ones go in there but I doubt I'll be able to recreate the posts.

[Pob255]

Update: Turning two into one.

The next stage of the front bezel is turning the two seperate halves into one solid piece, using 6 wood screws and glue.


I couldn't find the G-clamps at the time so I just held them together with masking tape, not ideal.
I started off with my largest drill bit (8mm) to basically counter sink the screw heads so they will be flush, yes I know I should counter sink after drilling the hole, however it's far easier to start off the hole with the large bit as it don't wonder as much as you try to start the hole and I couldn't find my punch to make a guide point.
That's what I hate about tidying up, I can never find things afterwards.

When I started drilling the holes while the tape was enough at first to hold the two halves together and stay lined up, however after the 2nd hole I noticed a gap forming between the two, stretching the tape and giving it slack which would allow them to shift.
So I took it apart to see what the issue was.


As you can see the mdf is burring up as I go into the 2nd section, causing it to push away.



This is simply fixed with my large drill dit, counter sinking the holes I've drilled and doing the same where the other screw hole will go.

I had another look for the G-clamps, couldn't find them but did find a mini-vice which I used as a clamp to hole the two halves together while I drilled the rest of the holes.



That done I applied some pva glue and screwed them together.

I left it over night to dry before I start sanding it smooth and fully level.

[Pob255]

Update: Sand and smoothing.

I started off with a sanding block and some emery cloth, Number 2, no idea what exact grit that is, I'd guess about 50grit


One of my cuts was very wobbly and it took a lot of elbow grease, time and dust (remember to always ware a mask MDF dust is very nasty for your lungs) to get it close to flush.
I also sanded the inside of the holes to dewibble them.

I then moved onto emery cloth Number 1 (guess about 100grit) and then number 1/3 (guess about 280grit) to smooth the surface.


Hard to tell by eye how level it was esp at the joint, so I painted the edges with black artist acrylic.

No I'm not mad there's a reason for this.


I left it over night then painted it again with white artist acrylic, that's a small rough strip of 400 grit wet&dry ontop and a clue as to the reason for painting it.



After some more sanding with the emery cloth number1/3 and wet&dry 400grit I can see that it's not quite as level as I thought it was.


And this was the the stright side, however it had some machine marks in it, I've filled these with a mix of MDF dust and white acrylic, this is the sanding after I'd filled them.

I'm still not 100% happy with the results so far, especially the side from my wibbly cut, but I have another cunning plan.


Cunning plan B

I had to go into work to do some overtime, so while I was there I borrowed this.



A good old plane the plane must be one of my most favourite hand tools, no use on metal but there's nothing quite like it for getting a smooth, even and flat edge on a bit of wood.

So I applied Old Faithful to the side of my bezel, oh and when I say Old Faithful I mean it.





The straight side came out like this, I'd done a decent job with the sanding although it looks like I went a bit heavy on the edges and didn't quite keep the sanding block flat.
That black thing is my foot, probably not the safest way to hold the bezel in place while I plane it, I really need a workbench.
Oh you can also spot some G-clamps, I found them however they are too small and I couldn't secure the mfd bezel to anything with them, which is why I resorted to my foot.


Next the wibbly side, as you can see that was a heck of a lot worse, again it looks like I've over sanded at the corners slightly.

While it does look like it could use a bit more, the plane is shaving off from the whole length, you have to keep the plane cut very shallow on MDF as there's no grain to it.
Main thing is that it's now level, I gave it another quick sand with 400grit to smooth it off and once it's painted there should be no sign of the join.

[Pob255]

Update: Mouse This does actually go back a good month or so

Part of the plan for this build is to colour coordinate the whole pc, so everything must be black&white, I've already sourced a lovely black & white saitek keyboard
note: these images are from amazon, I'll be taking some of my own later.



However duering my hunt for a mouse I came across a Kensington Graphite Studio Mouse

image off google, because in my enthusiasm to mod this mouse stayed in one part for only 10min, just long enough to test it to make sure it worked and I cannot link a Kensington product page because there doesn't seem to be one. manufactures not keeping legacy products on their web sites really me off

This mouse caught my eye for the following reasons:
The clear acrylic over the palm rest, which would match the front bezel I'm making.
The lack of wheel, the mouse uses a touch pad instead of a wheel, never seen that before.

My Plan for this mouse it to give it a black & white faded paint job, like I did for the mouse on project Spork

Sorry no photo's of striping the mouse down as I was in the grip of modding fever. I'll try and describe it.
The feet on this mouse are clear, so there was no hunting around for the screws that hold it together, removing them allows the bottom of the mouse to come away, although the top half is still connected to it by a ribbon cable.
The top half (which includes the sides) is a single solid unit, the grey sides are rubberised, so they will have to stay grey for now.
Next the two separate mouse buttons have to be removed, they are clipped in to the top.
Then the clear acrylic top can be removed, this is held in by 4 clips, which you have to pinch together, it was very fiddly as they are small and kept poping back into place when undid another clip.
I managed in the end by using tweezers to unclip one side, then insert wooden cocktail sticks to keep it from popping back in when I undid the other side.
With the top off I found I couldn't remove the track-pad wheel as it seems to be stuck down and I didn't want to risk damaging it, so I just masked it off along with the rubberised sides.
I then sanded off the sliver paint with 400 grit wet&dry.


Here it is masked up, sanded down and ready for painting, well almost ready, I did go it and smoothed out the scratches with 800 grit.


I then sprayed it black with artist acrylic and my trusty air brush, paint is still wet & camera flash is why it looks shiney.


Once dry and the camera really cannot cope well with a true matte black. (not a satin matte)


Next a white fade, again artist acrylic.


And as you might of spotted I got my thumb on it when I was moving it out of the way to dry, but also a couple of lumps of something messing it up as well. :roll:

Back to sqaure one we go, I'll have to respray it.

Additional: Speakers
I also picked up a pair of Storm speakers from Diamond audio off ebay for 99p, again modding fever took hold and I forgot to get photos before I started taking them apart.

Another google image search, the one's I got have a black body and silver plastic around the speaker grill


Sanded down and ready to paint.

There's a slight issue with these speakers, they originally came from some pre built system and they don't have a separate power supply, what they have is a plug which is designed to go into the back of a PSU, that has a separate 12v dc feed on the back.
My first plan was to get a socket and attach it to the back of the case and put a molex connector on the back so the socket could be powered off the PSU, however after speaking with my dad about this he's told me it may not work as all the pc components will be creating noise of the 12v line which could well be feed into the speakers.
He's taken apart one of the types of the psu with a separate 12v feed out of the back and apparently and they use a separate filtered feed.
It's a bit annoying because I did test them with a psu on it's own, I took the pins out of a molex and taped them to the speaker power plug, plugged in my Sansor Clip mp3 layer and just jumped started the psu, they worked fine and are very nice speakers, just hadn't thought about all the other pc hard ware causing issues.

Well all is not lost, I will still wire up a socket to a molex to test it and if it is getting noise from the pc components I'll just cut off the plug and rewire it to a separate 12v supply.

[Pob255]

Update: fan & cable holes

The 80mm rear fan is going to replaced with a 92mm fan, as I couldn't fit a 120mm in there, only just 116mm between the IO shield and the the folded lip of the back panel, so even if I cut a chunk out of the lip I'd still be 2mm short.
Front 120mm fan going to be added.
Additional holes to run cables, esp important as I'm using a normal ATX psu not the chieftec reduced length psu.


I've marked out the front fan, there's a snap out 3.5" hole that doesn't line up to anything on the bezel, I can only assume it's for a different bezel however it makes a handy base line for the fan position.
I'm using a slightly modified version of my standard Octagonal fan hole, to match the hole in the front bezel.


Choppy choppy!
Must say I find it much easier to cut straight lines than curves or circles (a to get neat and fully circular even marked out) so an Octagonal fan hole is much simpler to cut and look very neat.


East end mice are tough, they can chew octagonal holes in steel


After application of sanding drum, then a needle file (only files I have atm) and finally number 1/3 emery cloth (about 280grit)


Rear fan hole same principle.
This was my final straw for my old "workshop" brand rotary tool, took me ages to cut these holes as the speed control on my rotary tool has got so flaky I was constantly having to readjust it to try to get it back to high speed and stay there long enough to cut.


Those east end mice are back!

Next some cable routing holes


1st hole for the esp/4pin power cable thingy.


Plan for the 2nd set, these will allow the cables from the PSU to come out fromt the side and down behind the motherboard tray more easily.


More Choppy choppy!

Sanding drum, filing, hand sanding, you know it by now.


A quick test fit of the front bezel to check the fan hole is correctly lined up.

[Pob255]

Update time

Ok to start with an admission, I've not been posting these exactly chronological order, mainly because I cannot remember which bit I did when so I'm just going to keep going.

Just for Mr Bill Owen, today's update is brought to you by (yes this was the build log where I embraced starting each update with photo's of food and also in part to make Bill drool. )

Pink iced doughnuts and instant espresso.
This is the best of the instant espresso's I've tried, but it's still nothing like espresso, however treat it like normal instant coffee and it is very good for an instant.
Percol was also one of the first companies (and AFAIK was the first in the UK) to only sell fairtrade products and was one of the founders of the current fairtrade mark and system.

Akasa all-in-one


This is going to be in the 2nd 5.25" bay I managed to get it cheap because it's red and not such a popular colour.
It is a lovely cherry red, such a shame cherry red will not fit this build so I'm going to sand it and repaint it black.


The top is held on by 4 clips, once they are removed it exposes the circuit boards, held in place by screws and threaded spacers (like motherboard spacers just longer)


All the important bits out and put away safely, the door is just clipped in.
It's such a nice colour that I've still not sanded it as I'm still debating keeping some of it red.
I'm thinking of leaving the buttons and main connector area red, which will also mean I don't have to try to relabel it


Sand and prep the side panels, it took me a while to sand these down, I used my number 1, number 1/3 emery cloth then 400 grit wet&dry


You can see the wet&dry is now white, the powder coat was quite thick and the surface none too smooth, took a while to sand these.


But it is smooth now


A bit of over sanding on the vent but that's ok.


That's just the dust left from one panel, enough to write my name in.

Well this log is getting closer to catching up to where I actually am in the work.

[Pob255]

And that was the end of page2 . . . going to take me a bit to go through all my photo's and work out what was on page 3

I've made copies of all the google cache pages in case they go missing so re-doing the posts from pages 4,5 and 6 will not be an issue

Also Cannot find a cache of my original design thread, but I've got the images some place, I'll try to make a post out of them too.

[dulcificum]

Any pics of the finished product?

[KeyboardDemon]

Any pics of the finished product?

It's coming, don't worry, Pob will take us through the entire journey, seeing the end result without knowing what went into making it wouldn't do the work any justice, be patient, I'm sure this is another spectacular build.

[Ulti]

Ah I never saw this log! Do update us Pob, really eager to see how it's going!

[Pob255]

Ok ok I'm sorry, I'll try to sort it out tonight.

Here's a teaser for you I found the sketchup images, This was the first mod I worked out some ideas in sketchup first before starting it




I've made some test posts, they will be changing but you can see them now if you're quick

found some more sketchup files

I made a sketchup model of the internal frame to scale


I stuck a PSU and optical drive in to show how small this thing is, these cases originally come with ATX PS/3 psu's they are the same height and width as ATX but only 100mm long not the ATX 140mm long
This is a form factor that's gone out of favour now

Here it is with matx motherboard, the normal 3.5" bay (2 external + 2 internal) slots on below the 5.25" bay this means the bay overhands the ram slots and come down as low as the bottom of the middle hole in the motherboard tray area.
This is what allowed Chieftech to make these cases so short front to back, but they are a bit of a pig to work in as you have to remove the 3.5" cage if you need to get to the ram slots or the 24/20pin power connector and depending on the cpu slot location removing the cage can require you to remove the cpu cooler first.
I decided to ditch the cage as it's too much hassle, also this let me plot out how thick the bezel would need to be to give that bit extra space for ATX PSU and optical drive.

[Pob255]

Recreated post, might be missing some pictures and the order in which I did these might not be correct

The first thing I did once the bezel was done and the panels sanded was to do a test fit to see it it all would go together, so just stuck it together with masking tape to see.

The panel joins are covered with a couple of lengths of L section aluminium, I had a couple of lengths left over from Project Spork it's something like £2 for a 6meter length at a local metal wholeseller.
Next was trying to figure out how to attach the new MDF bezel


The frame is held together with rivets, which stick out so the bezel didn't sit flat, so I smeared some black acrylic paint on the rivet head and carefully aligned the bezel on the front


The paint left marks on the bezel showing where I need to remove some material


I used my newly acquired router rotary tool attachment to carve out some shallow hole, I got it from ether ebay or amazon I cannot remember which, it's not a dremel but they do do one 565 Multipurpose Cutting Guide Attachment http://www.dremel.com/en-us/tools/pa...l.aspx?pid=565 mine is a cheap silverline version http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002QS0J28
I'd not want to try it on steel but it works great on mdf and pretty well on acrylic (if I ever do any hand cutting of an acrylic fan grill type thing this is what I'd use)

No photo of the final result, it's just a few 2mm deep holes in the frame or the bezel, I did repeat the rivet head paint trick to make sure none where in the way.



How do I fit the bezel? simple screws. well not so simple, notice the thread is not smooth but toothed, this is a self tapping type screw esp for softer material like MDF, you drill a hole slightly smaller than the shaft, the idea is the toothed thread cuts a path while the shaft forces out the soft mdf around it compacting it, it's supposed to give a more secure hold in soft material.
The way I've designed this you don't need to take the bezel off so this is the easiest and most secure way to attach it.


Luckly there's a nice set of holes already there that I can use for the screws, so I just need to drill into the mdf to make a hole for the screw, I wrapped masking tape around the drill bit to act as a depth guide so I didn't drill too deep.
When you only want to drill part way into a soft material like MDF is when a simple hand drill really pays off for the level of control you have with it.


Remember what I just said about there already being holes? well there wasn't on in the bottom right and the motherboard tray is in the way so I cannot get the drill in there to make a new hole.


My solution use my rotary tool to cut out a section of the lip


Now I can drill a hole


And in goes the final screw


One bezel secure and flush fitted.

[Pob255]

Recreated post, might be missing some pictures and the order in which I did these might not be correct

Next step was to create a new rear for the top panel, as when it was a single peace cover the rear screws where just on the side not the top

First clamp the top panel in place, mark and drill the holes in the rear lip of the top panel, I over drilled to create marks on the frame underneath to act as guides.
I didn't drill all the way through because the panel needs slightly larger holes and the frame smaller holes.


The different sized hole was so I could use my thread tap on the frame, so the case screws will screw into the frame not the panel.


All screwed down and edging strips carefully balanced to check all was correct and flush.


Now another test fit, this time with a spare optical drive and we have a problem, it's not sitting correctly.

It was ether down to my wonky jigsaw work or a slight miss calculation when marking out the bezel but it's now sitting slightly higher than it should be, which means the 5.25" bay is not correctly lining up with the 5.25" hole in the bezel, so I need to adjust it.

First I figured out how far off I was


As you can see the bottom of the bezel hole is a good 2mm too high on the right and 4mm too high on the left.
It looks like it was both the raised bezel and a wonky cut.

So I then figured out where the bottom line should be


Next I came up with an idea on how to get round this that I'm still fairly proud of, I'm going to use my new rotary attachment as a router to clean up the hole, first I calculated the width of the bit to the edge of the attachment, then clamp a strip of L section at the correct height to act as a guide


I roughly carved out the majority of the material


Then gaining confidence that my idea was working I carried on eating out material

Basically what I was planning on is that the guide stops the attachment so I cannot eat out too much and once I'd roughly eaten out the majority I just ran the attachment edge along the guide and it left me with a straight clean edge.
And I'm happy to report it worked like a charm, unfortunately the bit couldn't reach down all the way, but that was ok as the inside doesn't have to be a neat edge, so I just flipped it over and carved out the rest by hand (ie without a guide)


Another test fit with both the optical drive and akasa multibay bezel and it all fits in the new hole, ok there's a bit of a gap at the top and it's not as straight as I'd like but I've got a solution for that.

Final test fit, with fan grills and power button as well, looks good.

[Pob255]

Test post 3

Nearly done now, I am missing the attachment of the L section edging strips, but I forgot to get photos when I originally did this, so I cannot remember exactly where it went.
I drilled some holes, my plan is for the strips to be riveted onto the side panels and screwed down onto the top panel.

On to hard drive mounting, as I've ditched the original annoying 3.5" cage and I'm only planning to put a single hard drive in here
First I cut a couple of rails from a bit of the scrap MDF from the bezel.

I'm pretty sure I originally ended a post with this image as a teaser, or it was a separate post just titled Hard drive mounting and this image just to be evil

These strips will be used with this single hard drive tray (I got it off someone on this forum, sorry I cannot remember who I don't know what case it came out of, but it's got some thick rubber anti-vibration grommets but it was missing 2 screws)


First I cut off the two hexagonal stand-offs from the bottom and bent the tab flat


Then just screw the two strips to the bottom.


Next was the screw issue, my original idea is to hard mount this in on the floor of the case, so it needs to be lifted up so you can get to the screws on the side facing the opening hence the MDF strips to raise it up.
The screws on the far side would be impracticable anyway as you'd not be able to get to them, my idea was to get some threaded rod or long bolts and cut the head off, this way you could slot it into the far side grommets then screw it in from the open side.
I wanted a 2nd opinion, so I had a talk with my father, after explaining my idea and asking if he had any threaded rod or long bolts in the correct imperial size (3.5" hard drives use standard case screws which are imperial not metric) He said no but he had a better idea, so off down to the shed/workshop we went (see 2nd post)

This is what we ended up with, the two original grommet screws and two custom screws, the custom screws where made by taking a couple of flat headed case screws carefully drilling a small hole down the middle of the head and into the shaft, insert a bit of thick copper wire, bend it over to form a loop, finally with flux, solder and a mini blow torch solder the wire in place like you would when soldering pipes.

Fitting you just screw them in by hand, they don't need to be super tight, they cannot unscrew once the drive is fitted because of the slight pressure from the grommets.


One old dead hard drive fitted to test, I gave this a god shaking to make sure it would hold and it did.


I then figured out where it would sit, making sure it would be clear of the fan and not get in the way of fitting the motherboard.


Flip the frame over so I can mark on the bottom the final location.


So I could drill some holes for the screws that will hold it in place.


While we're down here these are the feet I'm going to be using, Plastic with a foam rubber pad, they originally came off amplifiers from work where they are hung under desks so I had to remove the feet to fit them, which means I've had a big stack of amplifier feet I had liberated from work.