[Build Log] First proper scratch built case

[Nakazoto]

Hello, I guess I should introduce myself a bit.  My name’s David and I don’t normally do anything that wild with PCs.  I generally buy some decent components, put them in whatever case is cheap/available and call it a day.  I’ve never overclocked or water cooled anything and generally buy components that are about a generation behind.  Furthermore, we don’t have any of the fancy things generally used in building nice PCs, like a CNC machine or a TIG welder.  So this build will be done entirely using hand tools.

 

First things first though, this build is not finished (as of writing) and could very possibly fail spectacularly, but what fun is there in never sharing my failures with anyone, so let’s take this journey together!  Also, as a side note, I apologize if this doesn't follow the standard format when people make build logs on here.  Most of my internet build logs are focused around cars, so I just wrote this one in the same way I wrote those.  Anyways, let's get started!

 

They say necessity is the motor of invention, and there are some interesting things in need.  About three years ago I got married to a most wonderful woman, but she did not have a PC of her own.  So, I took it upon myself to upgrade my PC and build her one out of my old components, cause you know, any excuse to upgrade is a good excuse.  I bought a cheapo case for about 40 bucks for her PC and that’s how life was for a while.

 

But the necessity that spurred this build onwards is twofold.  First, having two PC cases to stuff in, under or around a desk is a huge pain and wastes a lot of space.  Second, and this is the more important one, my wife and I just recently moved from Japan back to America.  Now, when moving, weight is everything, so I pulled both our PCs apart, packed up the individual parts and sent them in a box.  Now, the cases are quite heavy and it would cost more to send them half way around the world than it would to buy new ones.

 

 

I cannot for the life of me remember what case we used for my wife’s PC, but my PC was stuffed into a Chieftec Dragon Full Tower with a window.  It looked exactly like this one, only with a window.

 

 

I had this case for something like 10 or 11 years and it performed admirably.  I was sad to see it go, but suddenly having a massive amount of parts in the US with no case presented me with a unique opportunity.  I could build a case from scratch!  But, before I got there, I needed my PC up and running right now so I could continue to work (my job is mostly done online).  So, I picked up a rusty little empty jobbie for 15 bucks, hit it with a quick coat of paint, zip tied in a hard drive cage and got my PC up and running.

 

 

 

 

Alright, so now that I had my PC running, it was time to start on my build.  I had this idea in my brain of an open air, air cooled, dual sided PC case that I really wanted to build.  However, before we get too deep into that, let’s outline the specs of each computer.

 

My PC

ASRock 990FX Extreme4

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T

Corsair 8GB x 4

AMD Sapphire Radeon R9 280X

Enermax MODU 82+ II

WD 1TB System Drive

Hitachi 2TB Gaming Drive

 

My Wife’s PC

ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+

G.Skill 1GB x4

AMD Radeon HD6950

Corsair CX-600M

Maxtor 250GB System Drive

WD 250GB Storage Drive

 

So, as you can see, nothing spectacular here.  My PC is plenty quick and runs Fallout 4 and Mad Max at buttery smooth frame rates, so no real need to upgrade anything yet in my eyes.  I may possibly buy another R9 280X in the future if I can find a good used one for cheap, and I’m planning on eventually making the switch to SSD, but other than that, nothing major is planned.

 

Where the real fun of this build comes from is the case.  So, once we got settled in to our new place (we’re shacking up with my parents for the time being), I headed out to the garage and got to work.  Normally, I work on cars, so this is my first time fabbing something for a PC up.  I started with a real simple drawing of the idea on a piece of a paper and some dimensions.

 

 

You can see my basic idea is to have each motherboard mounted to a central backbone plate.  Furthermore, each motherboard will be rotate 90 degrees from normal with all the connectors coming up.  There’s no real reason I’m doing yhis other than for some cooling.  I want to stack fans on the base, blowing up, which will line up perfectly with CPU cooler.  Other than that, really, I just think it’ll look cool rotated. 

 

So, digging around the garage, it just so happened that we had this massive piece of aluminum sitting in our scrap metal pile, which is sized just about perfectly.

 

 

You can see me offering up the PSU and marking out some lines where I’m going make my first cuts.  So, we tossed a metal blade in our circular saw, clamped the aluminum down and got to cutting.  Working with aluminum is so much easier than working with steel!  Everything cut super easy and straight.

 

 

But I wasn’t quite done cutting yet.  I want to stack some fans on the base plate to send some cooling air up across the motherboard and CPU cooler.  I needed a vent cut in the base plate to allow that.  I got to measuring and marked out the location of a few important things.

 

 

Then out came the jigsaw and a metal blade.  I spent about 20 minutes slicing it up and this was the result.

 

 

Then I offered up the central backbone and the PSU to get an idea of how things are going to go together.  I’m digging it already.

 

 

I’m big on everything being able to come completely apart, so I wanted total disassembly to be a thing that was still possible with this build.  Also, we don’t have a TIG welder, so welding aluminum was out.  I went to ACE hardware and picked up a piece of aluminum angle iron, brought it home and got to measuring.  After a bit of measuring, I pulled out my drill and punched holes in everything.  A few bolts later and we’re starting to come together!

 

 

Now you can just see the tips of the base bolts sticking out the bottom.  The reason for this is that I needed Allen head bolts for the base as they were the only thing slim enough to clear the cross bolts for the backbone.  The only Allen head bolts we had hanging around were way too long.  You may also notice that there is a third hole pointing down for the base plate with no bolt in it.  I initially planned to have six bolts clamping the backbone to the base plate, but the middle bolts interfere with the fans I’m planning on placing.  That was a bit of an oversight on my part.  Fortunately, it’s not too terrible looking and will be mostly obscured by the fans.

 

 

Next I needed to figure out someway to make it stand on its own.  So, first things first, the long bolts mounting the backbone to the base plate needed to be chopped short.  A little metal cut off tool made quick work of that.  Then I had a problem.  I initially planned on placing the fans underneath the base plate, but this would require rather tall stands, and I was slightly worried about the increased center of gravity.  So, I decided that there was plenty of room on top of the base plate and I’d just mount the fans on top, which would allow me to make short stand offs and keep the base plate low.

 

 

So, I took some bolts, ran a nut down them, drilled 4 holes in the base plate, and then cinched the bolts on upside down, so the smooth top of the bolts is what touches the table.

 

 

You can also see how the backbone plate is attached to the base plate in that picture.  Finally, I offered up some junk fans I had to get an idea for how the fans will mount.

 

 

And that’s as far as I’ve gotten!  It’s starting to come together but I still have a lot of work to do.  I have to drill and tap around 20 holes to mount the motherboards, build a hard drive cage, build a mount for the power supplies, think about cable management, and think of something for mounting the top of the expansion cards too so they aren’t just flopping about.  I have ideas for all but the last one, but that’s a bridge I’ll cross when I get there!

 

I’ll keep this thread updated as I work my way through the build!

 

Thanks for reading guys!

Cheers,

David

[ThatOneRussian]

Nice good to see more people making scratch builds very nice. Its quite nice to make your own isnt it?

[Nakazoto]

Alright, so I made quite a bit of progress today!

I started with marking out where the motherboard on one side was going to mount.  I measured very carefully, and double checked everything and these were what I had marked out.

 

 

So, all excited, I centered punched each place and drilled it out with a 7/64 drill bit.  My plan was to tap each hole and thread in the original motherboard standoffs.  After all holes were drilled, I got out my 6-32 tap and tested it on a piece of scrap steel.  It was tight and I’d need to go slow, but it worked pretty well.  So, I started tapping my first hole on the actual back plate and about halfway in, this happened.

 

 

Yup, the tap snapped off.  These super small taps are crazy weak, but also, the aluminum is super thick, which is hell on a tap.  So, after hammering the remainder out with a punch, we decided to punch all the holes out a small bit with a 1/8 drill bit to make it a little easier to tap.  After a quick test, this seemed to work well, so I tapped all the holes and threaded in my motherboard standoffs.

 

 

This looks awesome, and full of excitement I set the motherboard down on it to double check the alignment.  Seven of the nine holes lined up perfectly.

 

 

 

But, two for some reason did not. 

 

 

Now, I had an interesting conundrum.  They were close enough that I couldn’t just drill and tap a new hole, I’d end up with a large, mostly useless hole.  I could just not use those two, but that’d bother me to no end.  So, I went with my backup plan.  I punched all the holes out so they’d be big enough to send a 6-32 machine screw through.  While doing that, I reamed out the two offending holes so they’d line up properly.  Then I sent the machine screw in through the back side, cinched it tight with a nut, stacked a nylon spacer on top of the nut and then slid the motherboard down on top of that.  Then I took a felt washer (because the nuts were too large and perilously close to some resistors), slid that on and then tightened it down with another nut on top.

 

 

This worked brilliantly!  I should have done this from the go, haha.  So, I bolted the motherboard down completely, then slid my back bone plate into the base to see how it looks.

 

 

 

 

Oh man, that is going to look so awesome with two motherboards attached to it!  However, before I get too excited, I still have to do the other side.  So, I took it completely apart, flipped the back bone plate over, measured, center punched and drilled.  There were three holes this time that were off ever so slightly, so I had to ream those holes out just a tiny bit as well, but other than that, it all went well!

 

 

 

That was the big terrifying job.  Now that I have the motherboards mounted, the rest becomes quite a bit easier.  I need to make a bracket for the power supplies, make a mount for the HDs, drill the holes for my fans, mount the USB hubs and power switches, and then make a cage for the expansion slots cards to mount to.  I have an idea for the cage, but I’m still not sure, so I’ll do some more thinking on that while I tackle the rest.

 

Thanks for reading guys!

Cheers,

David

[Tearass]

This is really interesting! Can't wait for the structure of the case to come together, and for you to put in all the cooling and stuff. Seems like it would be really cool to have air flowing to both chambers with a single row of fans.

[ThatOneRussian]

Where did you get your mobo standoffs?

[Nakazoto]

This is really interesting! Can't wait for the structure of the case to come together, and for you to put in all the cooling and stuff. Seems like it would be really cool to have air flowing to both chambers with a single row of fans.

 

Thanks a lot!  Really, it's going to be totally open, so there won't be any sides going on it.  I want to show off the guts of hte computer as much as possible.  So the air flowing across along with just being open in general should help keep temps in check.  Plus, I've never overclocked anything in my life, so big heat isn't much of a problem.

 

Where did you get your mobo standoffs?

 

The motherboard standoffs were just made from some 6-32 Machine Screws, some nuts and nylon washers.  I picked them all up at Ace Hardware for less than 10 bucks.  They turned out really great though!

[Nakazoto]

Alright, so I got quite a bit more work done over the past few days.  The first thing I tackled was the hard drive cage.  Keeping in the theme of just using whatever metal is laying around, we had this old baking sheet hanging around in the garage.  So, I measured out some pieces, and got work using our metal break. 

 

 

The result was these nicely bent pieces of flat steel.

 

 

I drilled some holes in them to mount them to the backbone plate as well as some holes to mount the hard drives in them.  Now, with just one drive on the top, it’s not that stable, but as soon as you stack a drive on the bottom, the whole structure becomes nice and solid.

 

 

 

If it ends up vibrating too much, I’ll go buy some actual aluminum for the cage and bend that up.  Here you can see that the two hard drive cages are mounted opposite each other on the back bone, sharing the bolts.

 

 

My next goal was to get the holes for the fans drilled.  I’m using a slightly larger nut as a spacer to lift the fans up to the same level as the bracket that holds the backbone plate on.  Also, the dummy fans I’m using are mismatched, but I have some brand new Cooler Master fans that I’ll be running once it comes time for final assembly.

 

 

You can really see it starting to take shape here.

 

 

Then, it was time to get some work done on mounting up the PSUs.  I had two problems though.  One, I didn’t have enough bolts for the fans that I was just working on.  Two, I didn’t have any good material to make a bracket for the PSUs.  So, I hopped in my little Mitsubishi 360 and headed on down to the hardware store.

 

 

With some new steel and a lot of small bolts in hand, I headed on back and got to work making some brackets.  I cut the steel to length and then put a 90* bend in each of the four pieces.  A few holes later and I had this!

 

 

Now, I had a massive ”space cadet” moment here that the most of you will probably catch right away, but we’ll get to that later.  First pretty pictures of one PSU mounted up!

 

 

 

 

And time for my “space cadet” moment.  You can see that the reason that I have one long bracket and one short bracket is because I can’t easily reach the fourth mounting hole due to the plug being in the way.  That’s fine as three mounting holes is plenty strong.  However, on the other side, the PSU will be flipped in order to keep the fan on the outside.  So, that means the plug will be moved from the top to the bottom.  So, I thought, “I’ll just flip the brackets, problem solved!”.  Ya, I forgot that the PSU isn’t symmetrical.

 

 

Whoops.  It’s not a big problem though.  I just need to find some shorter bolts, move the brackets on one side up and drill some new holes.  All in all a very easy fix.  However, my back hurt and it was starting to get cold out, so I called it a night there.

 

Thanks for the comments guys!

 

Cheers,

David

[big_lilo]

Sweet!

 

I love that Mitsubishi! 

[Nakazoto]

Sweet!

 

I love that Mitsubishi! 

 

Thanks!  I actually bought it and restored it while I was living in Japan.  Then, shipped it back to Texas so it'd be here when it was time to move back.  You can see a lot more pictures here:

https://sites.google.com/site/nakazoto/current-cars/1967-lt23-mitsubishi-minica-360

 

Cheers,

David

[Nakazoto]

Alright!  I got back out there again today and got some pretty good work done.

 

I started with the mismatched PSU brackets.  A quick measurement, a few holes and that was sorted easy!

 

 

Next I wanted to tackle the big one I had been avoiding for a while - the mount for expansion cards.  While digging through the scrap metal pile we have, I found this nice flat piece of aluminum bar and looking at the piece, I suddenly realized an easy way to do it!  So, I mounted up the board and slipped my graphics card in place to get some measurements.

 

 

Then I cut and bent these four pieces.

 

 

I used the short bracket to mount the bent bracket to the back bone plate.  A few holes and a bolt, and it was mounted super solidly!

 

 

Then, I grabbed some extra cards, used them to mark out a bit of a template, and drilled holes through the aluminum.  I drilled all the way through and then grabbed some spare 6-32 bolts we had laying around and ran them from the underside up.  A few nuts and everything tightened right on down beautifully!  It's super solid too, I couldn't be happier with this solution!

 

 

 

With one side done, I had to get to work on the other side.  It's actually really nerve wracking trying to do the exact same thing twice in a row with no differences between the two, especially when it's all done with hand tools.  But, everything went super smooth and the other side mounted up with no drama!

 

 

 

The final piece to the puzzle was making mounts for the power switches.  I had some leftover aluminum angle, so I sliced off two chunks of that and punched a few holes in them.  Then, after waffling over the best place to mount it on the case it self, I chose my spot and punched a hole through.  All in all, turned out really well, and probably the beefiest switch mounts in computing history, haha.

 

 

 

And that's the big fabrication part done!  It looks pretty wild with all the brackets hanging off it but no computer parts stuck in yet.

 

 

 

 

Next up: ripping the case back apart, sanding and cleaning everything, then finally some paint and final assembly.  I also have a bit of wiring work to do with the fans, but wiring is easy compared to all the aluminum work that was just done.

 

Thanks for reading guys!

 

Cheers,
David

[Nakazoto]

Alrighty, I’ve been busy at work!

 

I started with tearing down the case in order to sand it and prep the aluminum and steel for paint.

 

 

However, after I dismantled the whole case, I took another look at my hard drive mounts.  It really bothered me how thin they were and while I was a little afraid of vibrations, I was more bothered by the fact that everything else on the case so far was nice and sturdy.  I wanted to keep the theme going, so, I rummaged around our scrap metal bin and found the side to an old PC case we scrapped long ago.  So, I got to cutting and bending!

 

 

You can really see how much thicker this steel is than the previous steel I was using.  These will be plenty strong.

 

 

After I gave all the parts a good wash and a wipe down, I hung them all up to dry in the sun and ultimately get some paint.

 

 

 

After the first coat of black.

 

 

In the above pic, you can see what looks like some deep scratches on the bottom plate, and indeed they are deep scratches in the aluminum.  However, that’s the bottom side and won’t really be seen.

 

 

 

After the paint dried for a few hours, I pulled the pieces off and started assembly.  I focused first on getting all the brackets and extra pieces oriented and bolted on tight.  It’s really starting to look good!

 

 

 

Then I bolted my first pieces to the case for final assembly, starting with the PSU and the power switch.

 

 

For the fans, I had some nice cooler master fans, but they were four pin fans.  I got a good deal on Amazon for them, but I really only needed one speed (on and full blast).  So, I chopped off the unneeded wires and ran all the +12 and GND wires on one side of the fans to a single Molex connector so the three fans could be driven solely off the power supply.  I checked to see if it would work before I went to cutting and the fans kicked on nice and fast with no problems, so it should be alright.  If they die or burn out, I’ll have to think of something else.

 

 

Here’s the row of three fans ready to be installed on the case.

 

 

And installed on the case.

 

 

After being pleased with one side, I set out setting up the other side.

 

 

Then I brought the case inside to finish up final assembly for the wife’s computer. 

 

 

Now, I must say that I was little nervous if it would work because while I was mocking the motherboard up, I accidentally knocked one of those tiny little surface mount resistors off.  I found the resistor and busted out my trusty soldering iron and soldered it back on, so I wasn’t sure if the mobo would work at all.  Fortunately, with everything bolted up and plugged in, she powered on just fine and hopped into the BIOS perfectly!

 

 

The reason I’m powering up straight into BIOS is because I bought my wife a new WD blue SATA 500GB HD.  Her old HD was a wonderful IDE type with the big fat ribbon cable.  It was time to upgrade.  I haven’t cloned the drive yet though, so BIOS is all I can get to.

 

 

Since one was working well enough, it was time to tear down my PC, pull it out of its $15 scrap case and put it on the board too.  After a bit of work and a bit of cleaning, I finally got everything set up and running just how I want it!

 

 

The laptop is what I take with me when I go on business trips, so I need it in a place that’s easy to access and swap files with my desktop.  It lives really well right in front.  Also, there’s a bit of cable management to be done, especially on the wife’s PC.  I need to get a SATA power to Molex converter for the fans so I can eliminate some of the wires coming out of the PSU and I need to clean up the wires coming out the top for mouse, keyboard, etc.  However, for the moment, everything works!

 

 

The fans are a bit loud, especially with both PCs running, but we usually only have one PC running over night.  Plus, I sleep infinitely better with the white noise of a fan to help me.  Even still, they may be too loud, so I may need to install a switch, so when I got to sleep I can turn the bottom fans off.  We’ll see how well I sleep tonight.

 

 

There’s plenty of airflow though and the temps seem to be pretty good (on my PC at least).  At idle, I get a CPU temp of 24* C and a GPU temp of 35* C.  Pretty much what I was getting before.  Under full load from wPrime, the CPU stabilizes at 37* C, which is really nice.  For the GPU, while under full load from Unigine Valley, the temperature stabilizes at 65* C.  A little toasty, but right in line with what I’ve always been getting no matter what case I was in.  That was at a fan speed of 45% too, so I could probably manually crank the speed up if I wanted it to run cooler though.

 

 

In my collection of spare computer stuff, I happen to have two old laptops as well, so I pulled them out for my ultimate nerd out pic! 

 

 

That was just for fun, I like to keep my desk clear so I’ll be sticking with just the two PCs and laptop for now.  I’m really pleased with how the case turned out!  As I said, there’s still some small cable management work to do and some HD migration to be done for the wife’s computer, but all in all, I’m super happy with how my first proper scratch built case went!

 

More pics to come as I tidy up a few things.  I'll also take some proper final pics in the daylight so the pictures don't look so awful.

 

Thanks for reading guys!

 

Cheers,

David

 

[Tearass]

Perfect execution with mounting two PCs on a single bracket, and I guess if open-air is your thing, then you've done great!

[Nakazoto]

Perfect execution with mounting two PCs on a single bracket, and I guess if open-air is your thing, then you've done great!

Thank you very much!  I actually really like the idea of open air computers.  When I was about 15 years old, I took an old 386 that we had laying around and mounted it to the wall in my bedroom.  I see this case as the evolution of that case (albeit 15 years later).

 

Cheers,

David

[Nakazoto]

Alirght, so with my new case built and it running pretty late, I shut off the monitor and laid down to sleep.  With just my PC running, the fans were a little too loud to sleep.  So we unplugged them.  The good news is that idle temps rose about 1* C and that was it.  So, I figured that during normal use, I don’t really need the fans to be running at full blast.  However, whenever I fire up Fallout 4, the extra airflow would be nice.  So, an idea was forming in my head.  The first part of this idea required a resistor!

 

 

That’s a 6.9 Ohm resistor that I salvaged from an old four pin fan extension, so it’s actually meant to drop fan speeds and not overheat or anything terrible.  In order to keep the ability to go back to full speed when I need it, I decided to wire in a little on-on switch.

 

 

Power from my Molex connector comes into the center pole, then on one side we have a direct line to the fans and on the other side we have the resistor line.  Of course, now I had to mount it somewhere, so I made up a short bracket and mounted it right behind the rear most fan on the bottom of the case.

 

 

You can also see I did a small bit of tidying up with the wires.  It was time to get started on the other side, but that PC was busy copying contents off the old IDE hard drive onto a backup drive so we could do a fresh, clean install of windows on the new drive.

 

 

After that all finished up, I soldered up my other switch, and was nearly ready to go.  I still had the problem that I had an entire cable from my PSU dedicated to the fans simply because I needed a Molex connector.  Fortunately, the PC shop in town had a SATA female to Molex female adapter.  Tossing the adapter in eliminated a lot of the wiring mess that I had before.  A few zip ties and she was already looking much better.

 

 

Then, while I was down town, I picked up some cable wrap and ran that along some of the big cables on the top to tidy that up a bit.  I think it really cleans up the look!

 

 

Here’s a few more pics of the PCs.

 

 

 

 

Here’s the whole desk!

 

 

Now I just need to get my hands on a real camera and take some proper photos!

 

Thanks for reading guys!

 

Cheers,

David

[DJ46]

Thanks!  I actually bought it and restored it while I was living in Japan.  Then, shipped it back to Texas so it'd be here when it was time to move back.  You can see a lot more pictures here:

https://sites.google.com/site/nakazoto/current-cars/1967-lt23-mitsubishi-minica-360

 

Cheers,

David

That car is awesome! I'm currently on page 14 and I'm really enjoying reading all about it.

 

You did a very good job with that case by the way. Also, is 65°C toasty for a GPU? Mine runs wayyy hotter.

[Alpha11]

That's some thick steel m8. That bitch is going to be heavy!

[Nakazoto]

That car is awesome! I'm currently on page 14 and I'm really enjoying reading all about it.

 

You did a very good job with that case by the way. Also, is 65°C toasty for a GPU? Mine runs wayyy hotter.

Thanks!  The car is huge amounts of fun, albeit a bit slow, haha.  Everywhere I drive it here in Texas, people come out to take pictures and ask me what it is.  Interestingly, making the computer case wasn't all that different than making custom brackets and what not for cars.

 

65*C isn't really all that toasty for a card.  I think as long as you keep it below 90*C most cards should be alright.  I don't overclock anything so I never really see any super hot temps.

 

That's some thick steel m8. That bitch is going to be heavy!

Aside from the PSU brackets and the hard drive mounts, everything on the case is pure aluminum.  It's still massively heavy though, haha.  If the thick backbone plate and base plate were steel, I'm not sure I'd be able to lift it!

 

Cheers,

David