The Chest Case mod project has been moving forward! If all goes as planned (which it rarely does), the final assembly will be tomorrow!
First off, I made two errors while making the design:
- I forgot to take the cables into account
- I forgot to take the cables into account
To start, the HDD/SSD cage will have to be moved from behind the PSU. Since the PSU is modular, meaning you can attach and remove the power cables, the removable cables are taking slightly more vertical space due to the connectors to the PSU. This means I’m about 1 cm short of fitting the drive cage in the planned space. I will therefore relocate it higher up, elevated partly inside the chest lid. It will still not be visible when the lid is closed, but will be the first thing you see if you open it.
Secondly, I did not study the physical component design of the motherboard before starting this project. All the motherboards I have ever used in the past when building computers have had their HDD (ATA/SATA) sockets flat on the top of the motherboard. This one has it on the side, on the opposite side of the rear panel where the USB, audio etc. ports are. That means that the SATA cables won’t fit unless I open a hole in the front of the chest for this very purpose. All angled SATA connectors are angled the wrong way, pointing down to the bottom of the chest. Or so I thought, after trying the three different kinds I had at home. After some scouting I did however find SATA cables with inverted angles, meaning the actual cable would point straight up. The space for the connector was still too tight though, only leaving a few millimeters to the edge, where it would be impossible to fit any connectors at all. However, carefully grinding down part of the front board of the chest from the inside proved to give just enough space to fit the cables. I did have to be very careful when grinding though, as the front board is only about 4 mm thick. When done, the board was only about 1 mm thick in the area where the SATA ports are.
Other than that, I have drilled, filed, grinded, polished and cut the case to have all the openings it needs to have, from air vents for the fans to a large opening for the PSU and motherboard rear panel.
Today I did some last revisions to fit the video card that was slightly to high when fitting it, and finished off with staining all the cuts and holes (“Dark Oak” dye), and also applying it to the surrounding chest panels for it to blend in better.
Tomorrow I will pick up the inverted SATA cables and a proper version of Windows 7, and I’m hoping to have the entire computer up and running tomorrow or the day after that.
Edit: All done!
