Got a New Case!

I hate to sound passé, but that's a swell paint job Jeannie. :) Love the big pics too.

Thanks, Gary. I'm paying for yesterday. My back was killing me this morning and my allergies are driving 'round the ben, up the way, and down the rabbit hole. Fortunately, things are starting to settle down a bit. Today is going to be as hot as...well, you know what I mean, so today might be a good day to kick back and watch some movies; I have all three Men in Black movies now.

Good idea Jeannie. If you haven't seem all the MIB series yet, do watch them in order. Then there's 3 Matrix, 6 Star Wars, and 10 Star Trek movies to wade through.
Not to mention Spider Man and Batman.

OH yeah, I have most of those myself more than once (VHS, DVD and Blu Ray). Jeannie take it easy. I cannot do what you are doing except soldering connector, did that for a custom cable hack for my Dell Precession T3400 to feed an add on USB 3 board with 5V power. One end is a regular 4 pin molex and the other was a sata power connector. Nice machine for free. Has a quad core 2.66 and 4 Gb DDR2 for Windows 7 32 bit. I have a fax modem in it for the times I need to fax. Came from my Tammy's work minus hard drive, sound card and video card. Found the correct sound card on E Bay for less than $20 with the 10 pin proprietary connector and I seriously could not be bothered to research and build a cable. I also got a 160GB and a 2 TB data drive for the unit. I already had a Radeon 6670 and the USB3 card and the fax card was in it. Its my emergency back up machine if one of the other three breaks. I'll post some photos of that one and my other machine which had an Asrock motherboard in it that started suffering from missing SATA ports and after it refused to find the boot drive I bought an Asus to replace it. Gary know all about Asrock paperweight boards. I have soldered up the sata connectors on the MB as they were dry jointed and you could waggle the connector and see them move. Its out of warranty and in the junk pile but OK probably works. So like I said take it easy, I have been enjoying the adventure of Arizona's Lady case modder supreme.

Thanks, Tony! I did take it easy today; too easy, in fact. I was going to watch a MIB marathon (I've seen them all but would like to see them again) but Good Neighbor Sam was on TV so I decided to watch it instead. Fell asleep midway. Watched a couple of Bones reruns after waking up. After I finish here, I'll probably watch an episode of Remington Steele (I have the entire series and I've been gradually working my way through them), read a little, then crash. Mayhap I'll watch the MIB's tomorrow.

I did put the front panel on the case and worked on the elongating the mounting holes slightly for the drawer and hot swap bay I added to the case so those are now pretty much flush. The aluminum insert I stole from a 5.25" bay cover and put onto the drawer front fits in very well. Fingerprints are going to be an issue so I need to locate a small, square, flat bottomed stick-on plastic or rubber foot to put on the front to use as a push point. I should have one knocking about here somewhere.

I can't think of anything else I need to do to this case other than finish up the PSU shroud and wait for the humidity levels to go up to reduce the chances of frying anything when I make the swap (it's really bone dry right now). The paint needs to dry for a week or two before I start sticking things to it (a custom label and magnetic tape to hold it to the PSU). One reason I decided to make the shroud was I was pretty P.O.ed (to put it mildly) at Corsair for sticking a large, ugly, tacky (pardon the pun) specifications sticker on top of the PSU and saying removing any sticker (not just the tiny one over a screw) on the PSU would void the seven year warranty. I could have easily made the shroud cover only the cables coming out of the end (and wouldn't have minded leaving the original on the case if I could have removed the ugly one on top) but, as I said, I was P.O.ed at Corsair so I decided to make the shroud cover the PSU and cables and make my own label to go on the shroud instead of using Corsair's (it would have been easy to duplicate). I liked the ship logo but didn't want to use the Corsair name (vindictive old bi...broad, aren't I?) so I decided to use the first name of the 16th century female Irish Chieftain and part time pirate (a corsair is a pirate, albeit from a different part of the world), Grania O'Malley aka Grace O'Malley (take that, Corsair, no free PSU advertising for you!). This is the design I settled on:



I'll print it on a 3 1/3" x 4" label, spray it with an art fixative (which I need to buy), trim it to size, then stick it to the side of the shroud.

If you guys want to see some really good modding that makes mine look sick (not hard to do), check out some of the ones in this forum. I got a lot of my inspiration and ideas from there.

Good idea for the label, I took the liberty....

Thanks, Gary. The trimmed size of the label will be only 2.25" x 4" (the side of the shroud is only 3.5" high) so the sail over the name style won't work well and the shaded lettering would be too small show up well. One of the early versions I tried is pretty much identical to the last one you posted. Corsair uses both the side by side and over under style so I tried maybe one to two dozen variations until I hit upon a combination of position, size, and font that worked well for me. Not that suggestions aren't welcome, however. I haven't printed any actual labels yet, just samples printed on letter size paper and cut out so I could hold them up against the shroud to get an idea how it would look.

Here is the version like yours (this was one of the final two; I've deleted all the others):



And here is the sample of the version I settled on setting on the side of the shroud (I still want to try it with the shroud in the case before I settle on an exact location). Forgive the lousy photo but I had a huge problem with glare until I killed most of the lights.



If the label was any larger, it would be too much.

No problem it's fun to fool around with logos, or any image for me. I figured if you liked any that I did the printer would scale it to fit the label size.

Yours looks good there. I think I would get some fridge magnet material and glue the label to that instead and it could be easily removed if need be.

Thanks but it won't work. The shroud is made of aluminum. Nice idea, though. I actually have an almost paper thin 4.75" x 6.75" piece of the stuff I salvaged from an advertising fridge magnet for a company I won't do business with and removed the label from just to see if I could.

What, magnets don't attract aluminum?

My bad, now I recall your saying you made it from Al. Have you posted pics of the shroud? I'd like to see that, I'm going to be doing a rebuild on mine soon...I hope.