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—21 2 08
Most of my modding time has been taken up with the reservoir project, and I flat forgot the mouse.
First, I dropped the plan of making a copper fangrill. It was a total pain in the *ss to solder and shape. It started to remind me of a souvenir from Mexico.
-I’m planning a plexi guard. I can’t get started on it until the rotary table I ordered shows up. I’m planning a multi-layered thing like the chimney/codpiece.
-Remember the Cristmas tree ornament casting experiment? It finally cured.
-I ended up with something that looks like it should be chasing Steve McQueen. The contents of the bulb shrunk into a purple…BLOB! It has a hollow spot and is full of bubbles, but is as hard as stone.
—28 3 08
-I did do some work on the mouse after I remembered it. Theese are spacers for a mac mouse skin I chopped up.
-I cut the mouse skin in half and added these spacers.
-Then I glued them to the mouse.
-Scarab beetle? Anyone think Steve Perry wants a mouse?
-Night shot. After a day of using this I noticed the buttons are a pain to click. I like to use the back of the buttons, but these are too stiff and only click if you touch the very front. I need to mess around with this still until I get the buttons right. (like it wasn’t tacky enough!)
-My new toy, properly caked in grease. Purchased from littlemachineshop.com, it came with a spacer for a chuck and bolts for mounting. The surfaces are smooth and perfect, and it weighs a ton! It’s made from a solid block of steel. -well worth the extra$
I have already named it George. Before I can use it I need to make a wood top for cutting through stuff. Kind of like a sacrificial surface.
—1 4 08
I’m in full modding afterglow right now. I’m pumped at how sweet the fangrill came out.
-Ahhh! Plank! What happened to you!?
-Here’s what happened. Someone bolted him to a rotary table and milled his face off. In this pic I’m still trying to decide if the plate is centered. I had to turn the table a bit and see if my marks stayed lined up with the point on the countersink. I had some problems early on with the mounting lugs for the spacer hitting bolts on the table.
-The rings seem to be already cut. Whoo! magic. Well, no. I just got caught up in using my new toy and forgot to take progress pictures. I did all the cutting with a 1/8″ 4 flute mill bit. The countersinks were added later. Drilling holes in a radial pattern is easy with the rotary table. Each turn of the crank is 5 degrees, so the first ring was 3 turns, the second was 2 turns, and the last was 1 1/2 turns. I cut out the center first and worked my way out.
-A makeshift buffing station. The parts I’m making here are too tiny to buff with the wheel in the garage. I would end up polishing my nails or launching one of these parts to God-knows-where. (I just looked. a couple of my fingernails ended up shiny anyway. -There goes my street cred!)
-To glue the risers correctly, I marked lines on the other side of the plate and used a carpenter’s square.
-I raided the scrap box for stuff to make spacers with. Here I’ve glued a bunch of 1/8″ stuff into a big lump for 1/2″ spacers.
-Here I’m making spacers on the ghetto file-lathe-thing. Is it appropriate that the file is a ‘Mill B*stard’? I feel like that should be MY name sometimes…
-I used a drill bit to hold the bottom spacers in position while I glued them. I use this type of syringe to apply the glue. (I know…I’m getting anal sounding, but someone was asking ’bout this stuff.)
-Here’s one for you… Before filing down and after. I wasted a cr*pload of plexi for 2 tiny spacers.
-Glued the 2nd ring down. Originally I was going to make each ring higher the closer to the middle. I don’t think the powersupply would have fit back in the case with the guard like that. It may not fit with this one on either.
-Last ring in place.
-It looks wicked, but it’s going to whistle like crazy! I put one of the rings in front of the front fan when I was sanding them, and it added a significant whooshing sound.
-The last thing I did was cut out the middle of the bottom brace.
So I need to:
-Mount the fanguard.
-Clean up the wiring around the optical drive.
-Finish that checkerboard ornament. (That will require hunting down my tilesaw.)
…and I’ll be done!!!
Thanks again to Danger Den!
—8 4 08
-I couldn’t resist dropping the grill on a LED fan just once. I noticed this close to the fan it cuts back the airflow a bit.
-Of course, the screws holding the old grill on were too short, so I polished up some new ones.
-Bloo’s sides open again and his guts are hanging out. The fan noise didn’t change much. The 80mm is too loud for me to hear any change. I was tinkering with the wire mess under the dvd when I decided to just cover it. The plan was to make a box to fit over the dvd drives butt.
-I started with a basic box, and figured out where the cut for the IDE cable should go.
-The second test fit showed that the power cables on the dvd drive were sticking out, so I built a little blister for that. I had lots of little bits of 1/4″ for the sides, so I went with that and rounded the edges like a madman.
-Here’s what I have so far. It’s nearly impossible to get a good shot of this stuff because it’s so dark. I need to dig out some double sided tape to mount it. I plan to make a little plate for the floppy area to go with this. -any excuse to use some velcro.
—11 4 08
-This is that double sided tape that comes with mini blind kits. I’ve installed hundreds of miniblinds, but I never figured out what this stuff is in the kits for. Maybe someday I’ll read the instructions. I needed something to stick the dvd backplate to.
-The white spots are the protective backing on some velcro strips. I snapped the shot before mounting the plate.
-Here I set up the back plate to glue the final part on.
-The backplate finished and in place. Check out the plexi dust in the HD bay.
-The next day I opened the case back up-HEY! What are you?!?! -BAD MONKEY!!! Get out of there!
-Remember that stuff I was planning to make a checkerboard with? I had put it away because I didn’t think I could cut it without the tile saw. I decided to give the scroll saw a try. I had had some luck earlier cutting some cast plexi that was much thicker.
-It took me a long time to sand the faces down smooth after gluing. I had to flip each row to get the checkers, so one row was flat and one row was the uneven backside.
-After polishing, I decided not to make a set of copper letters. That would have taken forever. I have some nice copper acrylic paint someone left me, so I used that. Unfortunately, I was having a shaky day. The nice thing about acrylic paint is you can wash it off if you screw up…and I did…a LOT.
-I installed it with more velcro tape. If I change my mind on the placement, it comes right off.
——The CPC blog format hates my oversize pics.:(
-We sort of had a nice day today. It was a good day to be out, but the sun never came out so I could take good pictures. This is one of the few shots that lets you see the cool purple reflections I get with this color scheme.
-Another backlit shot. Look at all the crazy color inside. That’s the closest this camera can get to the real colors. Yay natural light!
-Topdown. (dur!) I had to be carefull in the yard. My neighbor has four cats. Ill let YOU figure out the problem.
-The front. All the other shots from the front or at the same height came out blurry. The blue plexi has some kind of stealth technology.
-See? The back from any angle comes out fine.
-and more of the same.
-Here’s a tiny blurry shot of the front.
-What the heck-leave nature in the shot.
-I finish up with a nice closeup covered in pollen.
Once again, I have to thank DangerDen for helping me with this project.
So, That’s pretty much it! I hope you enjoyed this “no waiting” version of my project log.
it looks nice.
WOOF! No wonder I couldn’t get in here. I just deleted a whole load of spam comments. Explains the 10,000 members on the forums with asdf12345 -type names…
And ~I’m~ locked out of the forums…LOL.