Project :: Kaiten 11-9

[Breach]

Sup guys, welcome to Project :: Kaiten!

This project begins out of the ashes of my friend's home power grid assassinating my motherboard (I think). Instead of buying a new motherboard I decided instead to let all of those modding demons in me out and turn the ideas in my head into reality, upgrading performance and cool factor.

My orgional setup had a few problems-

First, my D5 pump was put in a way that needed a 90 degree fitting. Unfortunatly due to space I had to cut part of it off, and it never sealed well sometimes letting a lot of coolant out. This had to change.

Then, temps were a bit to high for my taste with a single BIX with CPU GPU and NB on the loop, with possibility of running SLI down the road.

And, my Lian Li V1000 was just not that cool:-(

Alright alright, enough talk, more pics! I tend to jump around different parts of my projects, so bare with me. First up, the custom front panel that started it all-

I did'nt feel the need to show everyone the blank acrylic panel. Using a coping saw, dremel, and needle files for a couple of hours got me this. Here you can see me cutting out the hole for the CD Rom. Using only hand tools gave me an exactly perfect fit in the case as you'll see later.

Messy work ><

PSOne LCD screen mounted along with the fan speed controller. I had to punch out the stock holes on both units a tad for the cap screws to fit. I will be tackling the LCD controller board a bit later on.

Installed for a test fit. It was a tight fit which is what I wanted. My system was still online at this point, you can see the black faced reservoir under the fan controller. Note the six holes on the acrylic panel match the res -_-

The LCD in action for the first time. Obviously...something isnt quite right. I have a proper Matrox Mystique card comeing to me which should drive the lcd right.

My next mod is not as obvious. V1000 owners might notice that the cage is installed exactly reverse of where it is stock. I did this to help hide all of the wires and shorten up length of SATA cables. This took all of 10 minutes to mark and drill out the new holes, well worth it I think.

Mark and drilling a hole for a Danger Den fillport. No tape I know, bad bad XD bad...

After some needle files and dremel wizardry, the fillport was right at home.

Overall shot so far. Now you can see the reservoir mounted onto the front panel using the origional bolts. The origional front was a 5mm smoked acrylic peice so this res should do just fine mounted to this 5mm acrylic instead.This is after my mobo went to the great fab in the sky :-(

Nice fuzzy pic of the hole I drilled for LED placement in the TDX waterblock. It will be lit up white. Motherboard cover in progress underneath it? Yes, but this is on hold until I decide what hardware to use after this mod is done.

New 2.5cm hole drilled for the output of my D5 pump. I am thinking that I would like to do something different here, so this will probably change.

 

[Breach]

Now back to that front panel. You can see where I am going with the res and fillport here so I will be able to fill the res from outside. The ovular control board was proving to be a problem until I did more test fitting. I discovered that I could mount it to the rest with a little bit of tweaking. A problem? Never for a man armed with files:wiz:-

Barley noticable, I just made a notch to clear the black controller box on the fan controller. There is zero clearance between the top of the pcb and the case, which made for a perfect fit.

Ah, technology sandwich :thumb: I used a stock drive cover as a bracket to hold this into the case. To mount the PSOne lcd board in I used some very cool aluminum spacers and screws I found at a surplus shop. Mounting of the harness and power converter will come later.

Black AC Ryan Radgrillz in place for measuring. Knowing this is an expensive case, I measured 10 times and cut once getting this-

Sweet candy

Black Ice GTS240 and Enermax Marathon fans? You bet. I tried out the fans and honestly...THEY RATTLE. Not sure if it is because of the magnetic suspension these use instead of ball bearings. I reseated the rotors and they seemed better, but I may not use these in the end.

Easy removal for cleaning which is cool

The obligatory pic of my modding mascot. Her name is Artemis

And my last pic today, a little teaser of things to come Whatever that is, I need a sander/polisher for it.


Until next time-

Breach

 

[Breach]

Alright, it's update time.

Remember the sander? Well, all I can say is Lian Li fans may want to look away:h34r:

And the answer is yes, I am going to polish this beasty:magic: Looks like murder in this shot though doenst it...

About 1/3 done. Turns out the sander I have has the most uncommon pad you can think of, so it was very, very, VERY difficult and irritating to find any discs for it, or pads to fit common paper sizes. This shot is after I ran out,which is mostly why got delayed the last couple weeks.

Unforutnatly with such little options of paper, I was forced to start with 120 grit. Not all bad just means I get to hand sand more. This is after a little treatment with 240. You can see it is pretty scratched up though.

some mockup action. I intend to keep the sides some form of black and the center fully polished aluminum

After 400 grit, the surface gets a little bit more sheen from 320 before it. This will be a long process, you will see it shinier and shinier in coming updates. To sand I have been going 90 degrees direction change with each grit, you can really see where you missed using that method.

Now for something else, I found these little aluminum struts (?) at a surplus store owned by Boeing.

Before I got too crazy sanding the bottom, I decided that these would make some nice clean case feet. Some holes and cap screws later I had all 4 mounted. I have since come up with something else I want to do with these, so stay tuned for that

Another shot. I like that these are low profile and unobtrusive. I may paint them black in the end but I have not quite decided. I will be putting some little felt pads on them too.

That looks to be it for today, but I shall return soon :dremel:

Mod On

-Breach

 

[el rolio]

awesome

 

[lozaning]

very cool looking, i like the feet.


i am kinda confused by the fact that you start the thread of by infering you were returning to the front. where did this start?

 

[w1retap]

uhh. yea, where did this start? lol..

That round control board looks like the back of a PSone screen...is it?

 

[Breach]

Err Everything is fixed



I had it mind to jazz up my case feet beyond being some weird metal brackets., the first part was just initially mounting them to the case. So...

Back in black I did these with semi flat like the grill is. Why not gloss? Im worried about overdoing the shiny with the main body being mirror polished. Could change, but I am happy with this for now. I taped off the inside to retain the brushed aluminum.

I broke out my coping saw and cut these out of 5mm acrylic

And here is where they go.

Ive decided to work with orange and possibly white as the color scheme. Backlit with a 5mm orange LED.

I drilled a hole for the LED to fit through, here it all is mocked up. The LEDs will be sanded down flat and will rest on top of the acrylic inserts for a clean and unimpeded look.

That is all for today. Staying home from work sick (really ) at least paid off for Kaiten anyway.

You can also see just a hair of a reflection on the surface now after 600 grit, slowly but surly

More to come soon

-Breach

 

[ganstafm]

like the feet very nice touch with the leds and would love to see this complete

 

[filthysanchez]

why not frost the acrylic in the feet?

 

[omegatotal]

i use those fans, they seem to be working fine for me, they were just about all free, and the few that i did buy, were $2 .. hurray for conventions haha they are quiet for me and move enuff air to keep my system cool

 

[Breach]

Yeah I was pretty miffed that they had a rattle to them, and I paid a lot more than 2 bucks. They seemed to settle after I reseated the rotors, so we will see. One of my pet peeves is slight noises and rattles

Filthysanches- I thought about this, but in the end I liked how they look clear. I more wanted the feet to have some orange light, but not be distracting.

 

[Breach]

And I return with more

Back to the front panel. I masked off certain areas and cut the designs by hand.

Sprayed with semi flat black. The other side will still look like a black mirror though.

After 36 hours of cure time the tape was slowly removed

I frosted all open areas aside the place for the LCD screen and the reservoir window. You can barley see, but the frost actually cracked the acrylic around the holes made for the fan bus. Luckily the damage does not extend outside of the frosted part. Irritating, but the show must go on.

Three aluminum rings. What from? They are spacers taken from a hard drive spindle.

There

Light test. I replaced all of the LEDs in the unit with bright orange. You cannot notice the cracks so much with the lights on, although I may still try to find a way to repair this.

Little mock up

And last today, I managed to sand up to 1200 grit. Took a while since it has all been by hand, but it is starting to pay off and is getting shinier. I can begin polishing soon

-Breach

 

[eab16hatchie]

very nice work...keep the pics coming

 

[brasherman]

Breach,
Do you know you can get replacement sanding heads for your sander/buffer? You can even go out and get a liquid buffer wheel to polish up the rest of the case with some 3M stuff!

 

[filthysanchez]

updates?

 

[Breach]

Well, in the end I was growing unhappy with the direction Kaiten was going in. I realized that the further I was going with the new front the more broken it was looking to me. So I sat down and really tried to envision it, and I near final design has become this -

I think this looks much more unified.

I should have more updates soon on Kaiten, I've in a way suffered a bit of a modders block with it. I think a lot of that is due to how much time it took just to sand the whole thing by hand to 1500 grit for final polishing, then just sheer disappointment with the design after that.

I started a new mini project to lift my modding spirit for a while which you can find here

-Breach

 

[bail_w]

may i know what kind of machine you use to sand your case?

thanks

 

[The_NME]

You'll have to bring that to a LAN sometime
.

 

[Breach]

I used one of these guys with a 120 grit disc-

 

[themark]

Breach, great work so far, with a couple of ideas I may even pinch from you for something of my own. I applaud your dedication to the polishing, as it is a mighty task on any project. You may be feeling lost with the overall design, but I think you have a really solid start. You've thrown a lot of things in there though, and perhaps you should step back, and strip away some of the things that aren't working. The paint-masked tattoo on the clear acrylic is the first one I would reconsider. It's such a strong statement that it begs a whole case, not just a front panel, and it's too late to re-do all of it. Save that idea for later. The totally clean installation of the LCD, and the rad-rez should be your key points to this mod. Give them a re-think and see what you get. I think you'll pull it off.

Oh, and another thing... tripod! Or less Mountain Dew.

 

[Breach]

Yeah, a tripod has been on my shortlist forever, I think ill be getting one of those over the weekend in fact

It was one of those weird things in design where I had a vision in my head but somehow just didn't quite turn out the way I was hoping for. It also seemed to draw more critisism than I ever expected oddly, mostly with the case feet. Not that I care about that so much but it did make me think about it more, and eventually I decided I didnt really like the lack of direction.

At any rate, I am working on a new little project for a while which is going really well, give a little break and come back with a fresh start to Kaiten.

One other issue was that the front panel developed cracks around the fan speed controller holes, and also the rings I wanted to use did not fully cover the paint mask areas either. So all in all it was turning out to be a big time failure. Not totally my fault, but still disappointing.

This is by no means a dead project, just put on the back burner while I do some other mods