[Worklog] Project Open Air

This came from an idea that my wife planted in my head (weather intentional or otherwise...) We were out shopping and saw some of these modular wire shelves. She looked at it and said "that would be cool if you put your computer into one of those" and so I started thinking. I don't have a theme or anything, looking for function over form at this point. This would be my second step into any kind of modding (if you could call it that, its going to be semi-home made), so I am by no means up to par of some of our fellow OCNers. I'm open to ideas though. At this point, I'm just kind of throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

So, I had this old Cooler Master Centurion case that I thought I could use for the motherboard tray, and maybe some other parts. It started out as this:


And through drilling out rivets, became the following:



For the wire shelf, I picked one up at Target for $20, it measures 30"x23"x13" (HxWxD) and has three shelves.


I've already decided that if this goes any further, I need to secure the shelves quite a bit better. I'm thinking of drilling through the posts on each of the shelves and reinforcing with a set screw of some kind. So, this thing is kind of roomy, and I started doing some test fits:





So the thought right now is to put the cooling components on the bottom shelf (two 360 rads, pump, 250ml res), motherboard and psu on middle, and optical drive along with hdd and pwr button etc up top. Hard drives will go into the mounting solution that came out of my HAF932 (previous mod). I'll be painting everything black to match. The motherboard tray needs to be trimmed up so that it fits on the second shelf. Auxiliary cooling for the motherboard will (somehow, yet to be determined) be provided by either a series of 120mm fans or a single 200mm fan.

Well here's the part where I want to hear from others. Is this an idiotic idea? Good? Meh? Do you have ideas/suggestions/thoughts? Hit me up. If youre curious of the components going into this, it will be a transplant of my current system into this, err, uhh, case?

Funny you say that... There are cats, so I was tinkering with the idea of wrapping it up in some mesh with acrylic windows... I was thinking of this kind of mesh:
http://www.frozencpu.com/products/10233/mes-08/ModRight_ModMesh_500mm_x_500mm_x_10mm_Slot_Style_Aluminum_Mesh_Panel_-_Black.html?tl=g44c12s450

Not entirely sure yet, but this wouldn't be fun if it was easy!

I like your idea of the compartments... The pump is an MCP655, so I think it'll have the power to push it

That micromax stuff looks cool, I'll have to keep that in mind if this little shelf doesn't work out. I'll be honest, the shelf is a shortcut idea right now. At $20, it's not too bad if it doesn't work. And if it doesn't, I can up tools or something on it. I still want the open air concept even if it's not this shelf, so that micromax stuff would fit
Edited by Th3Gatekeep3r - 8/14/12 at 8:19pm

I'll keep that in mind, honeycomb I think looks a little better than the slotted that I originally found. As for the cleaning, I've got an HAF 932 right now, with 15 fans all the way around, so I have somewhat of an idea of dust build up

Thats another good option, which I will keep in mind. It may end up that after looking at this putting something together with the prefab parts would make sense. After all, I haven't really started anything big on it yet.