The Camaro, 10 year old sons first build

[DMODZ]

 

My 10 Year old son Dylan had been getting hooked on the show West Coast customs and was enjoying drawing car designs on his sketchpad. He was very interested in trying his hand at some modding. Now I dont know much about cars but computers well! Its been around 12 years since I last modded a pc, life and kids and other sports had got in the way, time to dust off the garage and get out the tools.
So we began to put some ideas together on a project to Pimp up his pc West Coast Customs Style.

 

 

Dylan had begun researching on Youtube and came across JP Modified and became a huge fan watching all the vids..(on repeat).. So we used a few of JP's ideas for shrouding etc and set to work on the case.

The case we used was a Corsair Spec Alpha which fit out existing idea for a design like a glove. With Out of the box colour scheme matched in with Dylans Desire to do a Red and White Camaro. The case comes with some nice fans and manual and for the price tag is a great all rounder.

 

Dylan stripped down the case and prepped it up for spraying, he wanted as much white as possible with a small amount of black and red. Dylan had also watched Declassified systems build on YouTube and really liked Mark's Project Evolve build which had a painted motherboard.

Spraying was a learning curve for Dylan with quite a bit of coaching and re sanding and doing again as inevitably he would not release the push on end strokes or just hold the can too close etc. But a lot of guys I know think they can spray and get it wrong so for a young lad he learned pretty quickly.
Rad was sprayed and the ram heat spreaders taken off and sprayed too, then the one that gets the internet drama going, the motherboard. This was taped up and all the slots where padded out to not fill the connectors with paint. We then used plastikote and painted the board. I don't recommend you run out and buy a brand new motherboard for your system and spray it, Dylan's whole system was built out of old parts and stuff I had spare so if the board did blow it was no major setback.

Dylan then made the GPU plate and PSU shroud, again he was not much of a fan of the hotgun and was scarred he would get burned (sensible) but got the hanfg of it after a few goes and confidence grew. The GPU was an old 750ti which has some nasty protruding copper pipes. We decided to try and make a car bonnet type effect to roll the GPU plate down over the pipes to hide them.
PETG tubing!! What can I say again it didn't take him too long perhaps its just the confident gentle touch but he had it sorted after wrecking just 4m lengths. I was expecting this to be more expensive but he got there in the end which some complex bends to boot.
Once the water cooling loop was in we took a step back and checked out the work. The existing Acrylic window masked out a large amount of the work and effort we put in so we decided to cut out some sections of the case and add some runners. We then cut some Tempered glass and installed our own window which opened up the viewing area substantially. We then replaced the existing tempered with a clear version as the tint again did not work on a pure white build.

 

 

Dylan worked very patiently on the cable management and learned a few tricks sleaving his own cables and put in a good few hours getting it right. Hes very proud of his build and im incredibly happy to of shred this creative time with him. His zest for learning made all the more usual tedious tasks of modding a joy as his enthusiasm shone through. I learned a lot from the build too, not new skills but to open up my eyes a little to fun ideas as Dylan again had that no holds barred "lets just make it" approach.

Hope you enjoy our first build together and we are already working on our next project.


 

[Zando_]

Wow!!! Awesome clean build! 

[Jurrunio]

I build my PC like a monkey when compared to him....  I don't think most hardcore enthusiasts even bother spending time painting stripes on parts of the case. They just use RGB lights because it's easier

[Zando_]

5 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

I build my PC like a monkey when compared to him....  I don't think most hardcore enthusiasts even bother spending time painting stripes on parts of the case. They just use RGB lights because it's easier

Yeah. That's some insane modding skills right there! Especially considering he's 10 (8 years younger than me, and I struggle with basic cable management. )!

[tom_w141]

Congrats on being an awesome dad with a son that shares your interests  Great build.

[DMODZ]

Thank you very much very kind. I've been sharing it around as quite proud of him. Even if he did cost me a fortune learning petg:) 

 

There is quite a lot wrong with the build but I'd be a rubbish teacher if I kept taking the tools off him. So you learn by mistakes. 

 

He's got the bug now big time so now I just need to work out how to fund two habits instead of one:) 

[Zando_]

4 minutes ago, DMODZ said:

He's got the bug now big time so now I just need to work out how to fund two habits instead of one:) 

Once he gets good enough you two could probs do custom work, and make enough to fund your next build, then sell that, and so on. 

[davidna2002]

nice build!!

[DMODZ]

Thank you:)

[DMODZ]

Be rude not to do a matching monitor with him too:)