smaller wooden box
Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2011 1:10 am
Hi All, so I finally finished up my smaller wooden version of the big brass box viewtopic.php?f=14&t=59803&hilit=brass. Here's how it looks on the shelf:
It's a lot smaller than the brass box, I only wanted room for two hard drives, a blu ray drive and an ssd, so it's about 18.5" tall by 16.5" wide by 16.5" deep, although the lid on top adds an inch to the width and depth. I built it with the same basic floorplan as the brass box, there is an upright divider in the middle of the box, on one side is the motherboard and the PSU and drives are on the other side. Here's how it looked at an early stage of construction:
The frame and outer panels of the case are made out of poplar boards I picked up at Lowe's. The divider is particle board, couldn't find a poplar board quite wide enough for it. The motherboard tray is a part I got from a place called Mountain Mods, I thought about hacking one out of a cheap old case, but I couldn't find one that didn't seem like too much work. I had to trim the motherboard tray down a little with tin snips to get it down to the minimum size. You can also see that the PSU/drive side is much smaller, I suspended the PSU near the back side and put the blu ray drive vertically, which leaves room for the hard drives to be suspended vertically beside the blu-ray drive. For the side panels, I screwed the panels for the PSU/drive side down directly to the frame, but the panels on the motherboard side and on the back of the psu/drive side are hinged with clasps to hold them closed. For the motherboard side, I wanted to make sure I still had access to the sides of the motherboard, so I wanted to make sure the panels folded back far enough to allow full access:
You can also see the inside lined with acoustipak sheets, wanted to make sure it was as quiet as possible. In the picture you'll also see a much bigger fan in the bottom. I was thinking about using a single big fan at the bottom to cool things down, and I found a 350mm found that was actually 300mm across that could have worked. But when I tested it, part of the fan baffle had dropped a little low and started hitting the blades, and two of them broke off. At that point I had the system installed and ready to run, so I hastily stuck two 140 mm fans on the motherboard side and two 120mm fans on the psu/drive side. And, looks like 3 attachments max, so I'll put the other two pics in the next post...
It's a lot smaller than the brass box, I only wanted room for two hard drives, a blu ray drive and an ssd, so it's about 18.5" tall by 16.5" wide by 16.5" deep, although the lid on top adds an inch to the width and depth. I built it with the same basic floorplan as the brass box, there is an upright divider in the middle of the box, on one side is the motherboard and the PSU and drives are on the other side. Here's how it looked at an early stage of construction:
The frame and outer panels of the case are made out of poplar boards I picked up at Lowe's. The divider is particle board, couldn't find a poplar board quite wide enough for it. The motherboard tray is a part I got from a place called Mountain Mods, I thought about hacking one out of a cheap old case, but I couldn't find one that didn't seem like too much work. I had to trim the motherboard tray down a little with tin snips to get it down to the minimum size. You can also see that the PSU/drive side is much smaller, I suspended the PSU near the back side and put the blu ray drive vertically, which leaves room for the hard drives to be suspended vertically beside the blu-ray drive. For the side panels, I screwed the panels for the PSU/drive side down directly to the frame, but the panels on the motherboard side and on the back of the psu/drive side are hinged with clasps to hold them closed. For the motherboard side, I wanted to make sure I still had access to the sides of the motherboard, so I wanted to make sure the panels folded back far enough to allow full access:
You can also see the inside lined with acoustipak sheets, wanted to make sure it was as quiet as possible. In the picture you'll also see a much bigger fan in the bottom. I was thinking about using a single big fan at the bottom to cool things down, and I found a 350mm found that was actually 300mm across that could have worked. But when I tested it, part of the fan baffle had dropped a little low and started hitting the blades, and two of them broke off. At that point I had the system installed and ready to run, so I hastily stuck two 140 mm fans on the motherboard side and two 120mm fans on the psu/drive side. And, looks like 3 attachments max, so I'll put the other two pics in the next post...