nmil

Next update, going from "2D" to "3D"

 



Ready to "rock and roll"

G-code for the PSU holder. Forgot a finish pass here... Might have to redo this part but I am 90% certain that I can fix it with just some sand paper and some manual labor! Blunder by me in the programming. So easy to make a single mistake that can cost you the part and hours of work.

First cut underway.

Fist cut done! This is the cutout for the PSU.

Time to do some manual cutting and remove the leftovers!

One waste piece removed.

Cleaned up the tabs with a finishing pass!

Next operation was holes for fastening the piece and also the PSU unit itself.

Third operation was chamfers on the profile.

And also on holes and the top part of the piece.

Fastening the piece before the final contour cut. A bit iffy setup. I would have wanted a clamp on the "other side" also but I took a bit of a gamble since I did not have space.

Cutting the contour.

About halfway through the cut.

All finished! Turned out okay. Forgot the finishing cut... The roughing cut took 100% of the finished (my mistake) size so it just did a hallow cut in "nothing" on the final pass... Well it took some material due to tool deflection but still there are some visible tool marks. 3 of the 4 corners will be adjacent to other pieces so I think I will just do some manual sanding on one edge and Ill be fine. Still buggs me, oh well...

Fastened with stainless M4 screws. I am either going to polish these or paint them black in the final assembly. I have yet do decide. What I did want is stainless though. On Model 01 a few screws have gotten rusty in the insex slot due to humidity in the air and I would like to avoid that here.

Really pleased with the overall results so far.

Going from "2D" to "3D" really makes a difference.

MOAR PIECES, NEED TO MAKE MOAR NOW!!! Finally assembling something feels so great. After more than a year of planing and fixing, finally!

On to the next pieces, I have run into some issues with the design or rather "I don't like" the a solution for a assembly that I would want to redesign. It is one of these design vs function questions. A few years back I would have been function all the way. But now I don't know. I want to find a solution that pleases both. It is how the plexi glass should be fastened. Either this VERY clean no fasteners on the whole side or make "tabs" that I can fasten the plexi glass on 4 places in the case. But they are visible. I have been thinking about this issue for a few days. Have to decide right now what I should go for. I believe I have found a good solution that satisfies both issues

Thank you for the detail!
 
I am in awe. The design is gorgeous and the functional details are what engineer's wet dreams are made of. But, the real star is the execution. In this log we are getting to see how much forethought is needed for every cut and the very deep understanding of tools and materials required to safely attempt such a task. Yet you make it sound so simple... If this is what you do for fun, I am guessing guess you build Stargates for your day job?
 
Please submit this to the next Featured Build Logs vote. I would love to see Linus' mind blow-out over it!

Update #3

First cuts on the project! Feels really nice! I have not gotten around to edit the video footage so you have to wait a bit for that .

Gifs to be ninja added in this post and in a new post I think. Also working on a video. Hopefully it will be up later this weekend If I don't run into trouble with my little to no experience using adobe premiere...

Tried to describe the whole process as good as I could. Took a looooong time so I will probably not do this every time and It would also become quite repetitive. But I thought it would be good for those wanting to get into CNC, and to those who just want to know how it works! Hope you enjoy!

 


A fresh start, with a fresh spill board!

I use these small 12 mm hardened shafts to align the work piece to make sure it is parallel.

As you can see here the aluminium sheets gets pushed toward 2 of these to achieve perfect alignment along the Y axis.

Very soft aluminium clamps. Too soft maybe, but they usually scratch instead of the material.

Bottom side of the clamps. Allows for a range of about 2-10 mm thickness to be clamped.

I used six of these to secure a 8 x 300 x 1000 mm 5754 aluminium sheet.


Very flexible, I constantly have to bend these back when I get too rough with them. That's not good since they flex past the yield point and will eventually break. But I just have to make some new and improved versions then!

This is the part I am machining today. The very bottom part of the case.

4 mm polished end mill for soft metals like aluminium, brass, copper etc. Also suitable for plastic.

These are ER25 collets that holds the milling tools in place.

Here is a pack of them. Goes from 1 mm to 16 mm. And to the right you can see the special tool that fits over the "clamp nut" (name?) that squeezes the collets and consequentially squeeze the tool.

Here it is, fastened in the spindle.

No rush, measure everything twice. And then again to be sure. Then doubt yourself and measure again 

I am centering the program on the bottom left corner. I need to make sure I don't have a collision with the holding clamps and also don't go too far.

The chassis is 235 mm wide. This means I have about 20 mm of space left on each side for the tool path (takes about 12 mm on all passes on each side) and the clamps.

The contour cuts, and holes are made on the main/first side I mill. The lines you see here are tool path lines.

About to plunge down into the aluminium!

Contact!

Here you can see the chip evacuation. I am having a hard time showing you since the dust shoe is in the way. I even lifted it up to get some better shots, resulting in a mess! But it was worth it

Very nice surface finish. Really sharp edges with no rubbing or vibration marks.

Cleaned up the cut a bit with some compressed air.

First tool cut done, now on to bigger (and better?) tools!

Up from 4 mm to a 10 mm end mill! I do not have any tight inner corners this time, and a larger diameter tool produces a better cut than a smaller diameter tool. So I will use this 10 mm for the contour cut!

Auto Zero after each tool change. Goes out to the reference position and adjusts the ZERO-plane after the new and changed tool height.

I use these droplet canons on each side to apply coolant/lubrication fluids. Works really well. You don't have that mist all over the shop and it also evacuates chips.

Now using a bigger ER25 collet! And, you guessed it, the 10 mm collet for the 10 mm tool Rocket science!

The inner profile cut under way. This is the first roughing pass. I am taking about 2 mm per pass with a feed rate around 600 mm/min.

Tabs are starting to show! That means we are close to cutting through the stock.

Inner contour done. Now I just have to get that thing out of there...

These are the tabs I am talking about. They hold the part in place so it does not come loose during the cutting passes. The part coming loose will result in either the tool breaking, or damaging the part, or pushing it loose from its clamps. A pain in the ass, but better than the alternative.

I use a rotating tool that uses air as propellant. And I use these small and neat cutting disks. Much more robust than a Dremel disk, for example.

Cut done. But you can see that I am now left with these partially cut tabs sticking out. So that's no good at all.

This is solved with another pass. In programming I saved about 0.5mm for a finishing cut. Where I remove the last bit of material and at the same time improves the surface finish quality even more.

This will go in the bin with scrap parts that I might have use fore later. It's big enough that I don't want to just toss it.

Surface finish is really good. Now I just need to keep it this good until final sanding and glass bead blasting.

This is the second side of the part. Chamfers and some M4 holes were made here. You can see that my stock is defined as XYZ with the Z-axis starting on the top of the stock here instead of the bottom.

With the outer contour coming next, I need to secure the piece to the table since the outer clamps will do nothing when the piece is nearly free from the stock. If you don't have clamps securing the piece from "inside" like this, you must either use tabs or you'll get a V-shaped artifact when the piece comes loose, as the tool will push the part away the last millimeter or so. This may cause the part to bounce back into the tool and cause all kinds of issues. And because you lose the position of the part when it comes off the stock, that makes it very hard to do a final pass on it to clean up tabs. This is a real issue if you can't clamp it down. I will have some parts like that later, I fear.

I got a bit worried about marks so I put some plastic pieces to protect the surface of the piece.

This is what the code looks like. Some basic G-code for those interested, the S defines the tool speed, so in this case 13610 RPM. The M3 turns the spindle on in clockwise direction. M8 turns mist cooling on. Then G0 followed by XYZ with numbers tells the computer to go to that position in rapid speed (the maximum speed you have set it to). G1 works the same way but with the difference that it does not go to XYZ in rapid but in a specified feed rate (F). So for example, G1 Z11.5 F317 tells the motors to move the Z-axis to 11.5 mm above the 0-plane in with a speed of 317 mm/min.

The purple crosshair shows the machine's current position. You can also see some G-code, for example those dotted red lines are rapid moves in the XY-plane.

Sharp corners. Always nice to know that the machine is capable of that. You can sometimes get round corners, especially when the machine is trying to keep a constant velocity.

After a few minutes the cut is done. Here is the result. Now I have to release the clamps and turn the piece around and do the other side. There are some chamfered holes and a few more holes to be drilled.

Was deciding on the width for the chamfers so I did a few tests on an aluminium sheet that I was in the bin. Decided on 9 mm for the M4 screws and 7 mm for M3. A bit smaller than the ISO standard of 10 and 7.5 mm respectively. But I think it looks nicer with the smaller diameter so that is what I am going with.

10 mm Chamfer end mill. 90 degrees with a sharp tip. Used for plastics, aluminium, iron etc. Some kind of titanium coating, if I remember correctly.

Chamfers done!

Surface finish is very nice, except from that oxidized surface due to storage... I'll have to sand that down.

Really pleased with the first part! No mistakes as of yet!

One completed bottom piece!

For the side panel i'm going with one that's airbrushed and also doing a plain one painted the same as the rest of the case.
I'm doing the airbrushing in 3 stages, first the panel was painted the same as all the case but then sanded down ready 
for the shadows and base colours, protected again with some clear coat and then stage 2, now I have clear coated all 
the design and will be waiting for that to harden before doing the highlights and fine details followed by a final protective 
clear coat.
Some parts of the design will hopefully have a matte look where others will be a nice mirror/gloss finish 
to help him pop-out from the back background.  






This might look a bit crap at the moment but should look great when completed, I like to try use as many skills as I can when 
doing my builds, this is something I've never attempted before so i'm learning as I go along
As promised, here are some pics of the smaller project I just completed "Tron 2.0" this was just a case mod for now, using the
CoolerMaster MasterCase 3 Pro.
No log for this one, it was a very quick job with only the paint dry times taking most of that time up.
Done in white with slightly thicker EL wires and the same Mirror finish paint but this time in white.
I wont post lots of photos on here but you can find all the other on my facebook page if you need.
Thanks to elpanelandtape.co.uk and CoolerMaster UK for providing most of the bits needed for this one. 

Second update of the main work-log will be coming tomorrow or Monday. It's me cutting the raw materials for the case. I am also doing CAM programming right now for the first case parts themselves. Should make those cuts Monday or Tuesday if everything goes as planned. So very soon the first parts of the case should be done. 

Right now, Ill give you some more CNC-stuff for those interested
 


Check the spoiler tag underneath
 

So how do EL wires work exactly, do you just pass a current through them? Can you cut them at any point along the line? Can you solder them to normal wire?
 
Build looking good BTW 

I can vouch for the HyperX Cloud. Super comfortable, great noise isolation, good sound stage, and the bass isn't overblown unlike many other options.

Hi guys,
 
I've been pretty busy working on the build over the last few days, about a week to go now before it has to be finished! I did a ton of work with vinyl as well as some painting and I shot a nice video to talk a bit about the mods as well as assemble the whole thing!
 
Check it out below and let me know what you think!
 
 
 
Cheers,
 
Alex

Bit of a jump forward, but, it has to be done before LAN, so here goes... 
 
The rear panel is finished, bar 2 molex cables and 1 SATA power cable that I will be making up tomorrow, nice and clean 
 

 

 
Waterblock and backplate fitted and installed, look pretty good actually. If I had time, I would have done them orange, silver or white, but times against us 
 

 

 

 

 
Shhh... dont tell. I ordered a right angled IEC connector, not a left, so I had to remake it :3
 

 

 
Also, have a little logo sticker on silver vinyl schemed up . Mercy outline in chrome effect with the overwatch logo. Same goes for the top rad sticker, with all the champ related origin flags. White will be swapped for silver on the background, I think that is going to look sweet! 
 

 

 
Thats all for now folks! Nearly done! 
 

 

You thought I forgot with all the things going on right now....
 












 
Magoo thinks it was a job well done,he is having a well earned nap on possibly the dirtiest bean bag ever....
 


Many thanks to:
ASUS UK
KLEVV and Essencore
My hombres at EK
Tom Logan at OC3D
And the guys at Caselabs! Hope you like it Jim!

Though I can't personally stand the colour choices, this build still look sexy as hell!

I agree with the colour, but the craftsmanship is extraordinary. 

Can't wait for more progress.

Befitting of the last update, here is another "small" one.  Admittedly this took a lot longer than I was expecting as I had to remake the panel after I messed up the first one with some dodgy measuring.  Needless to say this was quite a bit of needle file work.
 


GPU bracket included

 
 

Looks ugly at this point but is functional

 
 

Ahh see, looks better now

That little thing looks awesome!

Normal people: Ohh so green
People in the thread: if I jumped out of the plane right now what are the chances of surviving tracking down the system and borrowing it.. Permanently

Looking good as always.

I just need to add clear luxe panel next. I ordered a shipping crate from OriginPC, to save myself time. It includes foam and inner cardboard shell. Scale USS Enterprise was added to the photos for fun for mod zoo staffer, Graham

The case looks good, but I think you could have used shorter cables to make the cable management a bit cleaner.

Here's a 3D render for a bookshelf thing I'm making for school.
 

Hello 
 
DOOM is done!
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Hope some of you enjoyed the build, for me it was a lot of fun. 

I would, but then again you did do all the maths you were one of the first guys I know of to build a fully passive 500W rig, so I forgive you. But next time I might not be so lenient.

Here's a 3D render for a bookshelf thing I'm making for school.
 

More 3D vomit.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/GEEXz

I'm having them hard anodized black after all the holes are drilled and fitted