PhelanJKell

CD, you amaze and inspire us new guys. If I had the skill you have in just one pinky finger... I could do anything...

ice_owl

Man you made a mess with that plexi but I bet you had fun. Looks fine, I wish I could see the picture in your head of the end result, all the awesomeness and high buck parts.I'll just have to wait.

__________________
Frayed ends of sanity

CyberDruid

Okay here's the deal...sometimes I assume that everybody knows what the heck this stuff I build is so here's a quick explanation of the purpose of this "case" I call TekCube. First off anyone that likes to tinker soon gets annoyed with their case and will be hooking stuff up on the kitchen table to test it. Let's say you think you have a bad stick of RAM...it's definitely easier to manipulate the RAM in and out of the slot if you don't have to pull wires and tubes out of the way and fight gravity and barely get at the motherboard..so tabling the mobo up top makes sense to me.

Second deal is once you modify a case for watercooling or whatever the holes you cut...that's it you gotta live with it. On something like this there's no need to worry about that you can try out a 240 Rad or a different fan or whatever easily without having to rework the case...since it's pretty much wide open. If I change my mind I drill out some rivets and put in a different panel bingo bango. That said the TekCube is all about tinkering and trying out stuff. It's to make tearing into the rig mo bettah.

Here's where I finshed off...


The CD and Floppy are held together with foam tape--the stuff peels off easy so if you want to change something...no biggy. The CD ROM is held to the base of the TekCube with velcro--this dampens the noise and makes it easy to pull the drives and put something else there or set a jumper or whatever. The hard drive cage is rivetted to the Lian Li tray but with a layer of foam tape between to dampen the noise.


At this point I was just starting to layout the cable routing. A pair of fans draw air right through the drive stack. This could be considered the front.


For fitment I used a PC Power 750 and a TT 750 to make sure there would be no issues. The PSU is trapped between two bottom rails and the top rail. A large area beside the PSU is a great location for a pump and/or secondary (24V) PSU if the TekCube was going to be used for LC.


I will put rubber feet on here in a bit. I left a cavity under the opticals to hide any CCL inverters or other doodads that might get fitted later.



I used a couple of dead mobos to check various places to put through-holes for power and data.





Here I have laid out and drilled a number of holes in the tray to allow for power and data cables to neatly reach their headers. I have one Bulgin Vandal-proof switch mounted and a hole drilled for the second (which I need to order). The 24 pin cable fits through the grommet easily.


Just to demonstrate I put a scrap of plexi on the rails and laid a pump there.


Just to demonstrate I placed a rad on the upper rail--all that would need to be done is route out the fan holes and this would become a LC TekCube...



The panel is the perfect size to mount the rad...the pump directly below would make for a short loop.




It would be a cinch to LC this station--simply mount a Cyclone reservoir over one of the fans and port the panel to the pump.





It only takes a few seconds to unplug and remove the entire tray with or without the motherboard.






Although not as compact as the LL test tray I built a while ago the TekCube is infinitely more flexible...taking the lid off is not something you want to do on the Test Tray...but on the TekCube getting your hands into some guts is a lot easier.

What do you think?

__________________
Current Project: CalligaCab: TV stand/bookshelf/PC-case

ice_owl

Nice!just thinking here but maybe you could add some wheels to turn it around better or some kind of spinning bottom. Just a thought.

__________________
Frayed ends of sanity

ModderMan

Nice Design can't wait to see how it turns out

__________________
There's a bit of ModderMan in all of us.

World of Warcraft Players club

kennymester

This would be an excellent product to sell if you can make it cheap and easy to use.

__________________

FrankenPC

Yeah, put it on a lazy susan!

__________________
Previous Member of Team Owners - 1st to hit 200k and 250K

Previous member of Rough Riders - 1st to hit 300k!!!

Adios everyone! I've been proud to be a member of Owners and Riders.

Witchfire

Outstanding idea, CD. Since you already have angle at the bottom of the structure that keeps the thing stable, I'd suggest replacing the rivets in the plexi with thumbscrews, or even some kind of wingnut-and-stud arrangement. Seems to me that ease-of-access being the keyword here, that would fill the bill nicely.

__________________
Some people live on this earth to do great things... Unfortunately, most are here simply because it's illegal to kill them.

12,277 in 3DMark06 on a mostly secondhand budget rig

CyberDruid

lol

Now that I have a pattern so to speak I should be able to make one in about half a day.

The materials are relatively cheap. The Lian Li tray costs about $30 a Stick of Aluminum costs about $25...then there's a few pieces of plexi..another $30...a few bits and pieces of hardware...the whole unit could cost about $100 in materials... which makes it pretty inexpensive as far as some of my projects lately

I'll be making at least one more and then I will have enough tech stations to really test Monoltih

__________________
Current Project: CalligaCab: TV stand/bookshelf/PC-case

kingsnake2

very good idea..its actually kinda pretty too, i'sd almost just want to use that as a case
except for the risk of some1 puting something metal on there and shorting out the mobo....

__________________