The last computer case I bought was a CoolerMaster WaveMaster in 2003 October. I sold it six months later, but the number of my computers increased.
I have a tree-huggin' hippy streak in me. I take kitchen vegetable waste and convert it into compost for my garden. I have a marvelous burgeoning population of red-worms; my potted lemon tree is producing fruit the size of baseballs. I drive a gas-frugal "Used" SUV because in my retirement, I think I deserve the ability to negotiate sandy washes and rocky canyon ravines in wilderness areas and wildlife preserves. For 30 years, I humped up and down the I-95 corridor daily in a Honda Civic.
It takes energy to make SECC steel, and probably more energy to make aluminum. It takes energy to roll the metal into sheets and bend it into computer-cases. ATX is still a viable standard, but the standard emerged around the mid-1990s.
Since then, cyber-junk has piled up in our landfills; local governments have been compelled to regulate the discards to specific locations and controlled processing; small computer shops now do a thriving business from their back-doors with recycling outfits while polishing up their front-door showcases; enterprising Asian immigrants rent large warehouses posting signs "Computer Surplus Center." In a way, I share that ethic -- from stories I was told by parents and uncles about surviving the Great Depression. I can't help myself: I get satisfaction out of turning junk and garbage into extended utilitarian value. An empty CD cake-box becomes a fan-blowhole duct; a spring clip from a defunct Zalman VGA heatpipe cooler becomes a retaining clip to hold an 80mm fan filter on a 70mm fan.
Here's what I do, although the LED neon glitz that would appear in the finished work doesn't show:
Modder's Mesh ala IBM-beige plastic
This was a 1996 Gateway 2000 Full-tower case for a Pentium-Pro -- just barely "ATX." It turned out that the motherboard-pan standoffs fit a regular ATX motherboard without any precision drilling. The plastic on these things gets a bit brittle over time, and the plastic tabs holding the logo-cover-plate on the frame broke off. The case-front also doesn't admit as much airflow as I would like. So I widened the holes behind the cover-plate, cut away some (but not all) of the window-pane plastic reinforcement, and shaped an extrusion with perforated sheet-metal (modder's mesh).
Case in Progress
Just steel sheet-metal. The old Gateway cases had some innovative, though irregular approaches to fitting extra drive cages to the case interior. Previously, I would yank these cages out and cannibalize them to build the simple, top-to-bottom stacked-drive cage we've all come to cherish. This time, I thought I'd work around the original design, and assure good ventilation for the drives with some noise-deadening shock-absorbers where I can fit them.
Completed Bezel
We'll eventually file away the Gateway logo and replace it with that of the old Bonzai Duckster -- Daffy Duck with a white headband tie-dyed with the Rising Sun. A fine file can take down these raised letters, and with a little care, no one would know there was ever anything there . . . until the appearanth of the thilly thavage . . .
Exhaust Fan -- exterior
I wanted to implement the design similar to the ThermalTake Armor, Lian-Li VB-1x00, and other case designs that puts a 120mm fan hole between the left-side-panel and the ATX-I/O plate. But this Gateway case had a simple, rectangular, recessed frame that held the I/O plate within it, which meant that there were two surfaces, a removable shiny plate that held the I/O plate to the rectangular recess pop-riveted to the chassis, and important metal surfaces and pop-rivets necessary for the structural integrity of the case. I decided to mount the fan on the outside, and chose an EverCool Aluminum 120mm fan.
These fans can be removed from their aluminum frames, and you can replace them with better fan-motors with a little care and attention to cannibalizing the fan-motor and mounts that you want. The EverCool has a bearing rattle -- not to bad -- but it also only spins up to about 2,250 rpm. It's maximum throughput is about 70 or 80 CFM.
To fit the fan, I needed to build a duct and a "standoff" from the recessed rectangular well out of half the fan shroud (pink) from an Enermax fan which I learned to hate.
The Dremeling was not to much trouble. It can be restful work, takes a little patience. Watch out for metal dust and metal burrs, though. Wear safety goggles. It is easy to spear your finger with fine metal shards, and you may find yourself picking them out of your flesh with tweezers. Perhaps some gloves would help. And maybe vacuum the shop area (with a good filter on your shop-vac) frequently as you work . . . If you don't wear gloves, wash your hands before rubbing motes from the corners of your eyes.
Exhaust Fan -- interior
I could've done a finer job with the filing and the edges could've been truer, but -- what the hey -- the air is going through that hole without obstruction. Perhaps a fan grill split in half would dress this up and keep my fan-cables from getting chewed up by the spinning blades -- a kind of fan-suicide, I guess.
FrozenCPU Front Fan Filter -- $20 Delta VXE for $4
A friend bought an entire case -- either a dozen or two dozen -- of the Delta 0.9A (12V) "VXE" fans through EBAy. The fans originally retailed for over $20 each, but he got them for $3 apiece and sold me three for about $12. If they're too noisy, I've got a pile of Sunons and Panaflos to choose from, but we're going to try running this sucker as either 7V or at half speed with a controller. My buddy says they're real noisy at the 5,000 rpm top-end. I think he said 5,000 . . .
The Delta Front Intake Fan -- interior
I used rubber washers on either side of this fan to absorb vibration. Hope it works.
Front Panel
Here's the front logo plate with the broken tabs. It turns out that I can put a machine screw through the remaining cross-brace of the bezel with a spacer and a couple nuts. The brass nut from a Zalman fan-bracket assembly holds it against the modder's mesh, and the surviving tab-stubs just luckily fit into the holes of the modder's mesh to add stability.
The Three-Drive RAID5 cage
I didn't need to do this. I got the case for free by trading cyber-junk at a warehouse computer-surplus establishment in Tacoma last year. I picked up the EverCool fan for $10, the Delta fan for $4, and three Zalman OP-1 80mm slim fans to cool the hard disks for maybe $5 each. But I liked the Lian-Li "three-in-two" drive cage: it has shock-absorbers for the hard disks, a fan and fan filter. That little extravagance cost me $30. But you don't need a RAID array for every machine you build, and I could've used the other hard drive cages anyway. Yup -- that's what it was -- an extravagance.
Cutting the noisy edge off the VXE
A patch of Spire Noise Deadening pad on the re-worked logo plate will cut the noise from the VXE fan. We're going to find out how much. If you want to seal a case's perforated vents as part of a deliberate plan to channel air in and out of the case or maintain case pressure, this stuff is great. The rest of it can be affixed on panels where it will do the most good to keep sound from bouncing around inside the case. It doesn't help your heat-dissipation in exploiting the heatsink potential of the case-metal, but good cooling strategies don't need to rely on that last grain of rice, either.
This case was just something I thought would come in handy when I salvaged it last year. I had decided to build a large RAID5 array and upgrade my server -- would you believe? -- a Pentium 3 750 with 640MB of PC100 memory. The server was housed in a loathsome, stubby, fat little InWin midtower with poor ventilation. But there is a method to the madness. I can shuffle hardware around and play musical cases, and this case is almost worthy of an SLI-enhanced AMD system I want to build next year . . .
Facebook
Twitter