[Build Log] Rustic Wooden PC [in progress]

[MEC-777]

5 hours ago, Christophe Corazza said:

All the parts look very promising.

 

 

I thought you already painted the fans bronze (see first picture of your previous post). Or is that the "base colour"?

That was the red/orange primer paint.  

[Christophe Corazza]

19 hours ago, MEC-777 said:

That was the red/orange primer paint.  

 

After a closer look: indeed it's more orange-like than bronze 

[MEC-777]

The copper CPU cooler, ram and GPU cooler are now sealed with matte clear coat. Was surprised to get a like, comment and follow from the guys at BS Mods on instagram after posting pics of the ram.  

 

One more coat of iron paint on one more small piece and those will be ready to rust. Fans are done, just need to get some pics of those before the final spray as well. 

 

Slowly coming together. Still looking for some small old school light bulbs and sockets. They are surprisingly harder to find these days than I thought. Everything is going LED and that's mostly all you can find now. Need to check the voltage on those outputs first though as I highly doubt they are 12v as the bulbs would normally run on. 

 

Here's how the ram turned out. I'm pretty happy with it. 

 

 

 

 

[TekRed]

Corrosion never looked so good

[Christophe Corazza]

For once, I'm perfectly fine with seeing a green PCB. It totally fits the "old school" vibe of your build 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

You need to find some way to incorporate Nixie tubes (they actually are still being made).

 

Automotive bulbs and sockets may work for this.

[MEC-777]

4 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

You need to find some way to incorporate Nixie tubes (they actually are still being made).

 

Automotive bulbs and sockets may work for this.

Yeah, a friend of mine has a Nixie tube display. They look awesome and would be perfect for this. If I could have them display CPU temps or something, that would be cool. Bit out of my budget for this build, but maybe in the future.  

[spider623]

can’t wait to see the finished product 

[MEC-777]

Ok, big update. Got a lot done yesterday. Majority of the painting is almost complete.  

 

All the fans are now bronze and have been corroded. They turned out awesome - just as I had envisioned! It's rare things go exactly as planned for me, so I'm pretty stoked. Been getting a lot of interesting reactions on the PC enthusiast facebook groups I shared these on. lol. 

 

PSU shroud has been "roughed up" and rusted. That also turned out perfect. I wanted to still be able to see just a bit of the logo and "V650" label on the side of the shroud along with the rust and I couldn't be happier with the way it came out. 

 

Today I'll be sealing the fans with the clear coat and working on rusting all the steel components.

 

Also picked up a free Dell Optiplex 780 which has a newer WD blue 500GB HDD in it with Windows 10 on it. Will be using that in this system instead of the older and slower 160GB HDD I was going to use. An SSD will be going in this build eventually, but one step at a time.  

 

Photo-dump time: 

 

The disassembled PSU before palm-sanding and treatment:

 

After sanding:

 

 

After rust treatment: (was sealed this morning). 

 

 

 

The tarnished bronze fans: (decided to do the PSU fan as well. It's all about the details).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The power switch:

 

After installing the RAM, I've realized I really need to do something about the red on the motherboard. It doesn't match the theme and will stick out like a sore thumb. I also don't want to do any corrosion treatment on those heatsinks because I know now (learned the hard way) that they can get extremely hot and I don't want to hinder their cooling efficiency in any way. Best thing at this point I think will be to paint just the red and silver parts black to match the rest of the board and blend in. 

 

 

 

[Christophe Corazza]

6 hours ago, MEC-777 said:

 

This one pretty much sums it up: This genuinly looks like you've salvaged the PSU from a junk yard while it was sitting there for almost a decade.

Truly an amazing job!

[8uhbbhu8]

Damn this is amazing! So much further then I would have thought of going. 

[MEC-777]

17 hours ago, Christophe Corazza said:

 

This one pretty much sums it up: This genuinly looks like you've salvaged the PSU from a junk yard while it was sitting there for almost a decade.

Truly an amazing job!

That's kind of the idea.  Thanks.  

17 hours ago, 8uhbbhu8 said:

Damn this is amazing! So much further then I would have thought of going. 

Thanks. 

[MEC-777]

Time for another fairly major update. Will post the next batch of pics in multiple posts. There's a lot.  

 

First off; my first attempt at the rusted components didn't work properly. They barely rusted at all. I might not have mixed the paint enough or something, so I mixed it up even more and re-applied a fresh coat, then sprayed the crap out of everything. That seemed to do the trick! Started rusting right away and by this morning, everything looked like it came straight out of a scrap metal pile. Perfect!  

 

Here's the rust as it was happening after a fresh spray of the Patina activator: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here's what those same parts looked like this morning, after about 12 hours:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once they were completely dry, I gave them a good coat of clear to seal them.

[MEC-777]

Up next; the PSU is complete and has been re-assembled.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[MEC-777]

And now, the graphics card.

 

But first, a reminder of what this looked like before: 

 

And after: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The brown PCB actually works perfectly with the look and theme. I must say, I'm REALLY happy with the way the GPU turned out.  

 

Next step is to finish blacking out the motherboard and then work on wiring up the power switch and power, HDD/activity lights...

[DildorTheDecent]

Going to look great.

[Christophe Corazza]

Indeed, it's going to look sooo sweeeeeet

 

I'm serious - especially due to the fan mounted on top - it truly looks like it's an antique computer part. And the corrosion makes it that much surreal.

I really need to have a look at those metal paints + patina sprays... see if I can't get them here as well, since that looks amazing.

Small question: have you actually tested the GPU already to see if it still works? Perhaps I'm a bit too impatient to see this thing working... 

[MEC-777]

7 minutes ago, Christophe Corazza said:

Indeed, it's going to look sooo sweeeeeet

 

I'm serious - especially due to the fan mounted on top - it truly looks like it's an antique computer part. And the corrosion makes it that much surreal.

I really need to have a look at those metal paints + patina sprays... see if I can't get them here as well, since that looks amazing.

Small question: have you actually tested the GPU already to see if it still works? Perhaps I'm a bit too impatient to see this thing working... 

Thanks.

 

I have run the GPU with the modified cooler and 140mm fan and it worked fine. That was before the paint, of course, but I made sure to be extra careful to not have any of the painting effect or touch anything on the card. Some people on the facebook PC groups have raised concerns about cooling efficiency of the CPU and GPU coolers after this treatment, but I'm not too worried about it. The paint doesn't cover all the fins all the way inside the coolers, so the heat transfer between the copper pipes and aluminum fins should still remain mostly unchanged. There's very little heat transfer going on further out on the fins where the paint covers. 

 

What I'm more concerned about is possible vibrations in the fans from the paint, if the blades become slightly unbalanced. But, we shall see...  Spinning them by hand they all still feel balanced and smooth. 

[Christophe Corazza]

4 minutes ago, MEC-777 said:

Thanks.

 

I have run the GPU with the modified cooler and 140mm fan and it worked fine. That was before the paint, of course, but I made sure to be extra careful to not have any of the painting effect or touch anything on the card. Some people on the facebook PC groups have raised concerns about cooling efficiency of the CPU and GPU coolers after this treatment, but I'm not too worried about it. The paint doesn't cover all the fins all the way inside the coolers, so the heat transfer between the copper pipes and aluminum fins should still remain mostly unchanged. There's very little heat transfer going on further out on the fins where the paint covers. 

 

What I'm more concerned about is possible vibrations in the fans from the paint, if the blades become slightly unbalanced. But, we shall see...  Spinning them by hand they all still feel balanced and smooth. 

 

I was indeed also a bit concerned about the heat transfer. But if you made sure that the insides of the fins are still free of any paint, then you should be fine.

 

For the fans: hard to tell actually. People have painted fans before without any issues, however that's not with those metal paints.

I guess... the proof of the pudding is in the eating! 

[MEC-777]

Blacked out the motherboard heatsinks today. Going to start working on some of the wiring and re-assembly this evening. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That AudioBoost chip at the bottom of the board lights up red. If it's too obnoxious, I'll have to put a quick little coat of black paint over that too. 

[Christophe Corazza]

33 minutes ago, MEC-777 said:

Blacked out the motherboard heatsinks today. Going to start working on some of the wiring and re-assembly this evening. 

 

- snip -

 

That AudioBoost chip at the bottom of the board lights up red. If it's too obnoxious, I'll have to put a quick little coat of black paint over that too. 

 

This might be a little tricky, but can't you also add some "rust stains" to the motherboard as well?

Obviously, only on those large open spots where there is nothing more than black PCB paint.

[TekRed]

4 hours ago, Christophe Corazza said:

 

This might be a little tricky, but can't you also add some "rust stains" to the motherboard as well?

Obviously, only on those large open spots where there is nothing more than black PCB paint.

I was thinking this too, maybe currode the heatsinks instead of black

[Christophe Corazza]

4 minutes ago, TekRed said:

I was thinking this too, maybe currode the heatsinks instead of black

 

Indeed, the motherboard looks too pristine compared to all of the other worn down components.

 

If you plug those components (for example RAM) straight in to the motherboard, the contrast between the corroded RAM next to a clean/pristine motherboard is very noticeable:

 

[TekRed]

18 minutes ago, Christophe Corazza said:

 

Indeed, the motherboard looks too pristine compared to all of the other worn down components.

 

If you plug those components (for example RAM) straight in to the motherboard, the contrast between the corroded RAM next to a clean/pristine motherboard is very noticeable:

 

 

Exactly, although once everything is in the chassis and all components are installed maybe it wont be so noticeable but OP went as far as corroding the psu fan, with that attention to detail I'm not sure why he left the mobo so pretty lol.

[MEC-777]

5 hours ago, Christophe Corazza said:

 

This might be a little tricky, but can't you also add some "rust stains" to the motherboard as well?

Obviously, only on those large open spots where there is nothing more than black PCB paint.

 

38 minutes ago, TekRed said:

I was thinking this too, maybe currode the heatsinks instead of black

 

13 minutes ago, TekRed said:

Exactly, although once everything is in the chassis and all components are installed maybe it wont be so noticeable but OP went as far as corroding the psu fan, with that attention to detail I'm not sure why he left the mobo so pretty lol.

All great points/suggestions and I agree, when looking at the bare board with the ram installed, it's a very noticeable contrast. 

 

The main reason I'm not applying any corrosion to any part of the board is because A: I don't want to risk damaging anything on the board or effect any of the cooling of the north and south bridge heatsinks, and B: It'll be installed down inside the wood crate and not a focus of attention/view once everything else is installed. It will hopefully just blend in below the CPU cooler, fans and GPU. The large heatsink over the VRMs on the board will be covered by one of the 80mm fans as well, so everything down below will be just like it's 'in the shadows'.