MCBrown.CA

Well, I de-rived and disassembled the case as much as possible a couple days ago. I was forced to stop when I ran into these spot welds.



I wasn't sure how to remove them so I did some research (and got help from OCN'ers ) but I couldn't find a 1/8" spot-weld drill bit anywhere locally so I decided to grind the welds out with a grinding stone.



Took a while but I buzzed out all the welds on the piece!



I put a couple tiny scores in the roof panel taking out one of the welds. Nothing deeper than about ~1/32" and they are on the inside of the panel plus they will be covered with paint. All the other welds came out fine with very minor abrasion damage to the roof panel from the grinding stone.



That's all the grinding I got to today (it's loud and the neighbors were out barbecuing - I didn't want to be an ass)... I've got about 10 more to do tomorrow.

I also cut the 5 1/4" optical drive enclosure things so that 320 rads will fit in the front of each compartment.



I located a guy sort of near me who does custom powder-coating. He said since black is a common color I could leave the pieces with him for a couple days and he will run them with a bigger job so it will only cost me around $45 which isn't that much more then spray paint and primer would cost, plus it will be a way better job that I could do myself.

A friend of mine suggested scrapping the case's original center divider (part the mobo is mounted to) and replacing it with a sheet of 1/4" smoked acrylic.

EDIT: By the way, Performance PC stocks the exact black 1/4" rivets that I need!! I was going to order a new water block from them in the next couple days so Ill grab a hundred or so rivets with that order...

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loop0001

gj gj!!
sweet deal on the powder coating too, it can be smendy
definitely liking the mod man!
anxiously waiting for more

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MCBrown.CA

First thing today was to remove this other useless piece of steel that was welded to the roof. Good riddance...


After removing the final welds that held the mobo tray in place, the case finally comes apart 100%. Oh, by the way, I did a bit of measuring and this case will fit two 480 rads in the roof as well as two 360 rads in the front as shown in the renders... Talk about gnarly loop potential. You could run dual systems each with dual loops in this case.


Remains of the welds were a bit rough...


... so I smoothed them out.


Unfortunately, I had to apply a bit of pressure with a chisel to get the toughest weld to 'pop' and it was just enough pressure to leave a tiny dimple in the roof. I was hoping to avoid this, but I think with paint it won't be too noticeable.


I definitely won't be using the case's original motherboard tray. It's got a lot of standoffs that were punched into the sheet and it would be quite a bit of work to grind those off too...


You can see the hexagonal end of the standoff were it was punched in.


1/4" smoked acrylic runs $12 a square foot locally, so I will be scooping a sheet of that for the mobo tray when I am back. I will be out of town for the next couple days but there's not much more I can do before paint now anyway...

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SystemTech

Awesome case, i would love a project like that. i think its gonna be amazing. why not discard the entire left hand side and replace it with rads. its not like you are sort on space lol. you can go absolutely mad with this. Acrylic will look much better than the steel.

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fossild2

wow that is an awesome project. I would love to do some thing like that!!

ModMinded

Great project, (and nice skillz on the sketchup!) and I agree with the acrylic replacement! Can't wait to see what you do with all that room!

Curious why you had to buy more bits, you do know those rivet heads can be taken off the drill bits, right? If you're grinding down the bits while deriveting, you might try some lube (water even)

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retrogamer1990

wow looking good! there are some weird and wonderful old cases out there huh

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Aaron_Henderson

You have the same rotary tool as me. Pretty beastly for the price. I got mine for $30 with the same kit as you it looks like. The flex extension was a bonus, but most of the bits were junk. Mine is actually scary powerful on full speed. Yours? I can see this mod turning out stellar by the way.

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