Andyl

PC Design Foundry Then today I finished up assembling the distributors and the doors. With the power supply side door installed. Both doors installed. I am now building a box to ship it in.

PC Design Foundry Hi All Been working hard on this but not had time to post an update. So here you go. I finished three coats of matte black spray paint. Received some black stainless steel screws from Accu. for the distributors. I also decided to make my own. They turned out quite well. These were striped in hydrochloric acid overnight. Then coated with three applications Sculpt Nouveau Stainless Black for just a couple of minuets. Started some assembly. Stainless Steel Feet. These may be replaced later by aluminium ones with rubber pads. Made some custom O-rings from 2 mm cord, it took more than I was expecting as there are some really long ones in this build. More to follow in next post.

PC Design Foundry Sprayed etching primer and a base coat of black. Will need some wet and dry sanding and then another coat of black.

PC Design Foundry. Made the doors today. Will start painting tomorrow. Nice clean cuts. Doors will have some extrusions screwed to the rear side to improve stiffness and flatness so the gaps will get better when done.

PC Design Foundry Remade the rear chassis to flip the power supply. Installed the rear IO parts.

PC Design Foundry Finished machining , tapping and countersinking the distributors. Did another fit check and they are super nice. Next I need to remake the rear chassis part to flip the power supply orientation. Also make the side panels. Make the O rings for the distributors. Then paint all the metal parts.

PC Design Foundry Finished cutting the distributors and tapped most of the holes. Have a few more to taps and a lot of countersinks to do. This is the 1/4 inch O Flute Cutter I use for acrylic distributors. Whiteside SA2075 Solid Carbide O-Flute Cuts very clean and fast. Even with an Auto reversing taping chuck it still took 40 minutes as there are so many holes. Did a fit check and it fits perfectly. Also installed the concealed standoffs to hold the front on.

PC Design Foundry Bent the top radiator cover and installed it today. Started machining the distributors. This is just the rough cut to remove most of the material. I will do a fine finishing cut tomorrow.

PC Design Foundry Bent up two of the radiator covers today and machined two more parts. Cutting the last radiator cover. Cutting the front vent panel. Here is a soda can for scale.

PC Design Foundry Got a bit more done. The vents take quite a long time to machine. Top vents. Installed a bunch or PEM standoffs to do some assembly Rear panel is not screwed on yet. Started making two if the three radiator covers. These are a bit harder because they have bends in two directions so I need to machine both sides and get them aligned perfectly. Will Bend them next week.

PC Design Foundry Got a few parts of the sheet metal done today. Also installed the Tappex inserts into the corner extrusions and did a quick assembly check. This is a really large case! Length 630.4 mm Width 324 mm Height 603.5 mm not including feet. Router setup as follows 3.5 mm cutter. 0.35 mm depth of cut. 1200 mm/min feed rate. 12000 RPM Did some sanding with the sheet metal still in place on the router to remove burrs. Before any bending. After Bending. Quick fit check. Lots more to do.

Here is an update from making the corner extrusions today. PC Design Foundry Setup parts on the router. I have to use an edge finder to set the 0 and also to make sure that the extrusion is exactly parallel with the machine. Machine using a long 4 mm diameter slot cutter. This is quite a long part to be making. I added some support in the centre for the next parts. The ends cuts are through all the cosmetic surfaces of the extrusion. Leaving it supported by a section that can be cut later with a hack saw. Finished cuts. Finished parts will be 626 mm long. Saw of the excess extrusion at the ends. Clean off the coolant and chips with water. Ready to install Tappex inserts. PC Design Foundry

I made a custom carbon fibre cover for the exhaust side of some EK Vardar 120s. since it is on the top of my enclosure Unfortunately since they were machined upside down the arms don't line up with the glossy cosmetic side up. My build is here.

The good news is you don't need a CNC Turret Milling Machine or Machining Centre to make these (very expensive) You only need a CNC router. I have a Stoney JBEC Professional CNC router. with 1.2 x 0.9 m travel. It cost more than $15K. Included in that cost was a large vacuum table attached to hold the work material down but you don't need that. You could use a smaller one for about $8k I would guess. I have not used a hobby router like a Stepcraft $1-2K they may be fine but just take a long time as you have to remove smaller amounts of material with each cut because they tend to have less powerful motors in the spindle and use smaller diameter cutters. Check these ones. You should make sure that the Z travel is at least twice the amount of the thickest part you want to make. If you are only making a single set of parts there are lots of places that will just contract out to make them for you. They will be about $200-300 per part depending on size. The problem with that is you don't want to make a mistake and have to go back for a second or third set! Check out my builds and equipment here. It has a distributor plate but you would use the same process and materials to make a Reservoir

Here is my other custom build from scratch enclosure project. I started this project in June 2017. I wanted an air cooled case that could take a full size ATX motherboard, power supply and full size graphics cards. However with no 3.5" drives, optical drives or water cooling to keep it light weight and quiet. CPU: Intel Core i7 8700K Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX Z370-E Cooler: be quiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Memory: 16GB (2x8GB) Corsair DDR4 Vengeance LPX Black, PC4-19200 (2400) M.2 SSD: Samsung 250GB 960 Evo PCIe NVMe GPU: ASUS STRIX GTX980 4G DirCU2 OC PSU: Seasonic PRIME Ultra 850W 80+ Platinum Power Supply Rear Fan: Corsair 120mm ML Series ML120 Front fans 2x Corsair 140mm ML Series ML140 White LED Carbon Fiber Side Panels Graphite Powder Coat

I made a 3D web app that you can use to play around with PC case layouts. You can change the components and drag them around. It will let you download screen shots to help describe what you are looking for, Have a look at PC Design Foundry

I built one of these for my custom case. It has a front mounted distributor plate that could act as a reservoir. It is CNC machined form two sheets of 10 mm thick clear cast acrylic (Perspex). If you want more volume of coolant you could use 20 mm thick with deeper pockets. You will need 2 mm Section O-Ring Cord to make custom gaskets. Some Loctite 406 adhesive to join the two ends of the gasket. (I found that you also need to sand around the joint area with some 200 grit to remove any adhesive that squashes out of the joint when gluing) You may need a G1/4 tap if you want to install standard fittings into the res. https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/threading-taps/6022113 You will need to design the res to fit your View 71 TG case. If you don't have access to a CNC router or CNC machine you could send the parts out to get made. Do a search for hans peder sahl video with more details. "Making a acrylic watercooling distribution plate / Manifold" You can see more details about my custom cases at. PC Design Foundry

Good catch. It was meant to be the other way round but as it is machined upside it got flipped. When I was looking a the CAD and the CNC program I forgot that and so it looked fine. I stick it down with strong double sided tape on the release liner on the cosmetic side of the carbon fibre. I do like the resultant pattern though it looks a lot like a gas burner. If I make it again I think I will just add the extra arms.

Here is my scratch build. Also check out this 3D design tool I made for laying out custom scratch builds. PC Design Foundry You can select all sorts of components and move them around. You can plan out hard line water cooling and can download files as X3D. I wanted a medium tower size with good air flow bottom to top. I also wanted to have a distributor plate on the front so there are no vent openings to keep it quiet. I moved the power supply to the front of the enclosure and used an SFX form factor to get a good fit with the pump. Then I was able to fit two 360 rads along the whole length of the enclosure. I used a Micro ATX motherboard because I was not going to need 7 PCI slots. Looking back on the build I wish I had got a motherboard with built in RGB LED headers as I ended up having to get separate cables with built in controllers for the LED's in the Fans. I also should change the connection from the pump to the front distributor plate to be a soft line tube at some point to minimise the bump vibration noise. CPU. Intel i7 9700k GPU Palit RTX 2080Ti Samsung 970 EVO Polaris 500GB M.2 Kingston HyperX Predator RGB 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3200MHz Asus ROG Strix Z370-G Gaming (Wi-Fi AC) Micro-ATX 800W Silverstone Strider SFX Power Supply 2 x 360 Alphacool NexXxoS XT45 Radiators 6x EK Vardar 120 mm fans. EK Water Blocks EK-XRES 140 DDC 3.2 PWM Pump Bitspower Matte Black Fittings Custom sleved internal cabling Machined corner extrusions form 1" square stock Aluminum 6082 on my Stoney CNC JBEC 1259012 router Installed Tappex M4 inserts so that the other enclosure parts can be assembled. I tried M3 inserts but the installation toosl kept breaking. Machined the sheet metal parts form 2 mm 6082 T6 Aluminium Stoney CNC JBEC 1259012 router The bed size is 1.25 m by 0.9 m with a vacuum table installed. Folded using Baileigh Industrial, Magnetic Box and Pan Folder I have to machine a recess at the bend points to get really curate bends and avoid cracking. Press in PEM inserts using Baileigh Industrial, BENCH PRESS (BP-3) These are the main motherboard mounting standoffs. Start assembly test. Machine first part of front distributor plate from 10 mm Cast Acrylic Tap holes for G1/4 fittings Test assembly fit check. Some components Fit check. I really wanted to have both the radiators and pump mount directly to the distributor plate with adjustable fittings instead of any additional hard line tubing. Make some custom O rings. The top fans are exhaust fans so I had to make a trim part to cover the rear labels. Powder coated. I used an outside supplier for this. Hand sand a brushed aluminum finish on the corner extrusions. I tried using a sander but it gouged the metal too much. Bottom fans are intake. A bit of a shame as you cant see the logos. Build some custom cables. Since the power supply is up front I needed some really short ones. Also sleved the pump cables. Making some custom PCI power cables. Make some hard line tubing. PET 16 mm Machine a carbon fiber side panel and top fan trim. Machined in a water bath. First boot.

I wanted exactly the configuration you are discussing but could not find one. So I built one from scratch in my workshop. Check out the pics. It is full size ATX mother board and PSU. Has space for full size graphics cards. Two 140mm front fans. Rear 120mm fan. NO Drive bays. I just use M.2. And have room for an SSD if I need it. Carbon Fiber side pannels! I can configure it to any size if you needed one with Front or top rads. I can mike more but they are not cheep. PCdesignfoundry.com