The pollen counts this year have been completely bonkers and my allergies have been driving me around the bend. The last few days have been driving me insane(r). We are way short of rain (1" so far) so the summer haboobs (dust storms) are going to be real stinkers.
I've bought a Sharp air filter to replace my old and failing Sharper Image Ionic's, it's quiet and a HEPA filter unit. Uses a pre-filter to carbon filter to the HEPA. I bought sheets of carbon filter material and have it doubled up and it's washable. I highly suggest this unit below as it's easily found on sale and works great !
Ionic Air Purifiers: Home Air Purifiers w/ True Hepa Technology for Humidification
From the outside it kinda looks like my Lian Li case, however its way updated. It is very desirable.........I am thinking my way to one right now
I haven't been getting much done on the case because I had been waiting on parts (the holiday didn't help much) and dealing with allergies, etc. I finally picked up my mail, including the parts I had been waiting on, yesterday and found out my mail service will be closing down the 18th of next month so I had to rustle up a new one. Now, I'm having fun dealing with address changes. Whoopee! I also wasted a bunch of time yesterday looking for some #16 wire.
I was a bit disappointed with the sleeving I got. It's good sleeving but it doesn't quite match the PSU sleeving. That alone wouldn't have bothered me but it wouldn't expand worth beans so it would have been a bear to stuff my front panel cables into it, assuming I even could. I found another brand of sleeving from a domestic vendor that looks good online and has larger sizes so I just ordered a bunch.
I also got my replacement ATX pin removal tools (I also got a spare) and finished cleaning up the removal of the piggybacked PCI-e cable. I could have just snipped off the extra cable but the snipped off ends would show and could get shorted out so I removed each pin, snipped off the extra wire at the pin, then put the pin back in. 'Twas a trifle tedious. And yes, I am anal (and proud of it!).
The top cable is the one I removed the piggybacked cable from. If I ever get a different GPU card that has more than one PCI-e socket, I'll do the same modification to the other cable rather than use the piggyback to avoid excessive voltage drop, higher current through the plug and socket at the PSU and because it would just look better. That piggybacked cable just looks ugly!
One of the parts I was waiting on was a piece of aluminum to make the PSU shroud from. I can't believe I couldn't find it locally without having to buy a huge piece of it; I had to order a 1/16" x 12" x 12" piece from Amazon. It was a bit stiffer than I was expecting—in fact, it was downright springy, even for T6061—so I had some fun bending it last night. I cut the aluminum to the length of the shroud in my little bandsaw (I love that thing!; I never dreamed I would get so much use from it when I bought it a few years ago for a project), then bent it before cutting it to width. I'm glad I did because it didn't bend exactly where I wanted it to. I also had to resort to a hammer to get it to bend so it got dinged up a little; fortunately, nothing a little body glaze won't fix. After bending, I ran each leg of the resulting angle through the bandsaw to get the correct width. I had to cut a notch in one end; I did that free hand in the bandsaw rather than use a fence (it was the only way I could fit it in the saw). I'll have to get some body glaze to fill the slight ding marks, then I can prime, glaze, and paint it. I'm going to use magnetic tape to hold it to the PSU.
I tried crimping some pins to the #16 wire I got and had some trouble with it too. I found that if I crimp the insulation first, then the wire, I could get a decent crimp. When I did the pull test, the insulation pulled apart when I pulled hard enough to pull the pin off the wire; you can't get any stronger than that. I really baffled by the trouble I'm having since I didn't have this much trouble when I made the cables for my present case and some of those pins had two wires crimped in a single pin. I'm still trying to sort out what's different this time around from the previous time.
Edit: Forgot to mention...I got the replacement fan hubs and cut down one of them (the other is a spare) and cut the rpm trace between the two output connectors. I haven't tested it yet. Mayhap tomorrow.
Last edited by Lady Fitzgerald; 01 Jun 2014 at 01:17.
Just a thought.
With a multi wire crimp you can us a very low heat solder to make sure all wires in the pin have good conductivity. One must be careful not to over heat the pin.
A little dab of solder will do.
I haven't gotten much done on the case lately. A week ago, I was informed that my mail service was shutting down next month so I've been dealing with getting a new mail service and making address changes. Businesses weren't too bad (mostly) but dealing with various government bureaucraps (no, I did NOT misspell it) has almost driven me to drink, drugs, and murder. Yeesh! Adding insult to injury, I discovered my driver's license had expired last month (for some reason, although I suspect I know what it is, I didn't get a notice in the mail like I usually do) so I had to get that taken care of. Added to that, my stupid allergies and idiot back have been acting up on me.
I did a little work the other day on the PSU shroud, trying to knock out the dents I made bending it (I would kill for a brake and a place to put it), then filing and sanding it. I'll have to use a tiny bit of body glaze on it after priming it, but I have it pretty much cleaned up.
I worked on sleeving the front panel connector cables tonight...er...make that last night (it's morning now). The new sleeving I ordered was much easier to work with than the first batch. The first batch has a nice tight weave that won't show color as readily as most sleeving but, since my wires are already black, that wasn't an issue. The problem was the stuff wouldn't expand very much and the largest size was only 1/2". The newer batch has a looser weave which expanded nicely to go over connector bodies. It also came in 3/4" and 1".
Here are the results of tonight...last night's work:
I had to take the front panel assembly apart again to sleeve the USB 3.0 cable (the cable on the bottom). The rest of it was fairly easy, just tedious. I found one of the switch wires had pulled out of the pin. I didn't have any pins like it so I fished the pin out of the connector, shoved the bare wire end wire into the portion of the pin where the insulation normally gets crimped, soldered it, then put the pin back into the connector body. I also glued the two conductors insulation together right by the connector body to help prevent the bare wire from breaking off since the insulation didn't get recrimped. Hopefully, that should hold it.
The large sleeve in the center—3/4", there was no way 1/2" would have worked—is just loose over the cables so I can pull more length out or back in once I plug the cables into the MOBO headers. The two front panel switches, HDD LED, power LED, USB 2.0, and firewire cables are all corralled in that big sleeve since they will all go to the bottom of the MOBO.
The top cable is the front panel audio cable. It has to go to the sound card so it will take a different route than the rest of cables (the USB 3.0 also takes a different route).
I'm considering getting a second ODD to put in this rig. The one I have now (actually two; the one in this rig is the spare I got for the one in my current rig) is a BD ROM combo with Lightscribe. ODDs with Lightscribe (a way to use the ODD to burn a label on to a disk designed for it) are pretty much impossible to find now (the reason I got a spare). I won't make very many Lightscribe disks and I have plenty Lightscribe CDs and DVDs so I'm set for life as long as the ODDs don't die on me. Getting a second ODD will allow me to use it for the heavy duty work and I can use the Lightscribe ODD only when making a Lightscribe optical disk which should, hopefully, let it last longer.
Good job as always on the sleeving Jeannie.
Mail service? I have the USPS here, do you need a private one due to your location?
Thanks, Gary!
I live in the middle of a major metropolitan area but I've been using private mail services instead of a P.O. Box for years now due to the USPS' childish policy of not accepting deliveries from common carriers such as UPS, FedEx, etc. because they are competitors. The USPS is very incompetently run. A private mail service is also a far more secure place to receive mail and packages. Home delivery is subject to having mail stolen from mail boxes and packages from any carrier just get dumped at the door in plain view of everyone and their dog and are subject also to being damaged by weather or stolen before I pick them up and bring them in (often, the delivery person can't be even bothered to knock). With a mail service, packages have to be signed for and get delivered only during the service's business hours instead of just being dumped at a door.
Could you post a page where you got that type of sleeving?
Your going to make me do all my harness over.
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