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—21 12 07
I got the air bled out of the lines. It’s MUCH quieter! No more whirrr-WHOOOSH! The design turned out to be useful for bleeding the air out. The air would get trapped in the fillport. I could use a syringe to top the tank off through the pressure release line, then pop the spring loaded top on the fillport to burp it.
—22 12 07
-Done for the holidays…
-Of course, that doesn’t mean I not done tinkering with it. I could be messing around with the insides for years. I thought I’d try something to get rid of the ribbons. This jig is a long scraper blade in a mitre box. I twisted some vinyl hose through it to make spiral wire wrap.
-Much better. Just moving the wiring behind the pipes made a big difference. I may play around with braiding the buggers to see how it looks.
—26 12 07
I got bored and added some LEDs to the tachometer jack on the pump. The cpu fan plug seemed like a good scource for light for the waterblock.
Whenever no one’s looking I’m popping out to the garage to solder something.
—27 12 07
Never done…
-So true. I tried braiding the cables, but that looked like sh*t. I tried counter-wrapping the coil with some vinyl string. That worked pretty well. Now my only floppy drive with a black face died. I didn’t know a floppy drive COULD die. I have about 12 spares, and none of them have a matching faceplate style, so no switcheroo is possible.
-I added 3 UV LEDs to the cpu fan jack. The LED on the long wire moved to spotlight the stovepipe.
-The waterblock and it’s new lights. Somehow I got pics that aren’t blurry this time! The blue wire wrapping around the copper pipe is the tachometer line to the pump. At the time I did this I had decided to ‘embrace the cable mess’.
-Just some non-blurry eye candy.
I just pulled another batch of tubing out of the dye, and the Christmas tree bulb casting experiment is airing out on the back porch.
—1 1 08
I’ve been doing little bits of modding when no one is around…
-I chopped out some wire looms for the power switch assembly.
-And I went postal on the accordion bottle. First I cut it in half and removed the silicone glue.
-Then I applied heat to the edges and bent them over with a letter opener. (This is something I picked up during my pyro-sculptor phase.)
-I added material to the middle by burning some of the extra tube I cut off. Polyethelene melts like wax when heated. Kids, DON’T try this at home!
-LDPE pops and fizzles a bit like bacon when burning. These bits of melted plastic are harmless in small doses. It’s the FUMES you need to worry about. It’s less noxious than other stuff I have burned, but still not very good for you. (-Like anyone here will be doing this kind of stuff.)
-I now have an ugly, but airtight endcap on my bottle. I decided to try epoxy for the other end.
-So I had this heavy copper wire out, thinking I could use it to make the case wiring stiffer, and I decided to try to make a custom grille for the powersupply fan. I already know it’s going to be a little lumpy, but what the heck.
-A five second solder job closed the main ring.
-I ripped the powersupply out to do some work. I took this chance to trace out a guide.
-Doing this by hand came out less than good. I will need to make a jig with nails and wood. That means woodburning fun during the solder phase! yay!
-I’ve never tried this before, but I knew it was easy. I trimmed an IDE cable to fit. At first it didn’t work, but I realized I hadn’t got the connector on all the way. It worked fine after I smacked it with a hammer. (*bubba voice* That’ll learn him!)
-Surgery…or slaughter. I decided to hack off all the wires I didn’t need.
…and I was just picking on someone about voiding the warranty. Why does a $15 PSU need a warranty, anyway?
-I’m not healthy enough to solder wires, but I have some neat molex plugs for the lazy. I’m going to convert the useless sata plugs to molex. I will only use it for LEDs, if anything.
-Here’s how the doo-dad works: You jam the wires into the holes…(notice I re-wrapped the power cable.)
-and snap the cap over the back. -Easy! I shortened the orange wire and capped it with shrink wrap.
I slapped everything back together and was surprised at the lack of FIRE when I turned it on. Even more amazing is that everything still works.
…and no fire!
This long and meandering post was brought to you with help from Danger Den!
That pump is freaking quiet!
—7 1 08
I’ve been busy on other things, but I got enough modding time to screw something up.
-The epoxy on the expansion bottle seems to be sticking fairly well.
-I have it in place and working. I needed the extra hose for cable wrap.
-Not much luck with the Christmas tree bulb casting experiment. It still reeks of acetone after airing out for a week. It may never dry out with that little vent hole.
-Here’s my problem. I did some wiring, and was really careless on keeping them sorted. When I test ran the system, the hardrives didn’t detect. What I need to know is: If I swapped the ground wires accidentally, does It have an effect?
I need to know if I fried 240gigs of drivespace.
I’m hoping it’s just bad soldering. I do a lot of that.
—
OK. False alarm.
I was thinking the connections were loose on the molex plugs because they were made for thicker wires. When I popped the wires out the insulation was not cut through. Removing the insulation left the wires flopping around in the jack like a catfish, so I added a lump of solder to each section.(-more deja-vu. I’m repeating a lot today.) I had to smack them into the molex with a mallet, so I KNOW they are making a connection now. The drives work fine now.
—9 1 08
I did some spectacular blunders on Hypnotoad because I worked with a fever. My favorite was drilling a countersink on the faceplate on the wrong side of the panel.
-The wiring I reworked. I cut out the insulation and added a bead of solder on these spots. Then did the same thing to the end plug.
-I drilled a hole in the corner of the PSU cover for a support beam for the pipes.
-I couldn’t get a countersink going in here, so I fixed the captive nut in place with heat. I put it on the end of the screw in the pliers, heated it up, and jammed it right in there. I added a little epoxy for insurance.
-My current state of ‘organized.’ I think I will have a problem getting the newly spliced USB cable behind the PSU. The big fat splice point is right where the PSU is pressed against the back wall.
-I added one of the wire looms to the power wiring set.
-Let’s have another moment of silence for yet another victim. This time I have destroyed an old floppy cable to splice the USB extension cord. Proof that I’m back to normal is that I was able to solder IDE ribbon cable. You can see here that I added some extra color coding to the cable to keep the wires in the right order. The ASRock board’s USB jumpers are at the TOP of the board, just under the pipe that hangs over the video card. I was a long reach AND a tight fit! The area under the motherboard must look like a rat nest at this point. All my extra wiring is jammed up under there.
-The finished splice job. You can see the sleeved connections are huge.
Yesterday I ordered a cheap mouse and new floppy drive from Geeks. I won’t know how I will mod the mouse ’til I see it. I splurged and got a NEW floppie drive. -What the hell, five bucks! It was cheaper than 10 floppies on the same page!
I’m soooo close to closing it up and moving on. (jinx!)
More thanks for Danger Den.
well work
good mod
Thanks, TjediAI. I haven’t heard from you in a while.