Zds Project Log

As I mentioned, my old digicam went broke and I had to get a new one. While I was at it, I went for a lot better one: Canon Powershot 620. The size is about the same, but two years of development and 100 euros more price ensured that inside it’s a lot better:

It’s a wonderful device. It can be either full automatic, full manual or almost anything in between. 7 megapixels, 4x optical zoom, very good image quality, 1.3 sec boot power-on time _with_ extending the lens, fast enough processor to continuously shoot as much as you will without having to wait for the camera to save. And it supports tons of pre-set modes, one of which is panorama mode - very nice!

On actual modding front, here is my latest acquisitions:

On the left is 120mm Nexus fan; I bought it mostly to have common reference point with other silencing enthusiasts. On the right is Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160G SATA - the first 160G hard drive with just _single_ platter. I plan to have two of them in RAID-0 configuration once I’m done with this.

Right now it will just replace my 160G 7200.7 PATA since SATA cables are a lot easier to fit to this mod. The reason why I bought it now is that one of the discs in our home server has failed and I plan to swap that PATA drive there. Additional 120G of disk space does not hurt either, since the drive it’s replacing was just an old 40G IBM workhorse.

This is status from last night; I had to wait until tomorrow midday to get some images, since my digital camera refused to work - and it’s pretty hard to get repair or replacement one for few days right now :-D.

The images are crappy, even thou I waited for the lightest time of the day, since I had to take them with my phone camera. It does not have fastening for tripod, nor flash, and we have only some 4 hours of daylight per day, so do not expect any good quality images for few days :-|.

As you can see, the shape is now mostly there:

Filling the last cracks and bumps is underway, but this starts to be good enough for the purpose.

According to Anandtech NVIDIA Will Buy ULi Electronics.

Too bad :-(. ULi has been a manufacturer with very interesting products and lately especially complementing ATI chipset products. NVidia on the other hand fights fiercely against ATI and is known to have used unfair competitive practises when in a position to be able to do so.

But we’ll see.. I’ll keep keep my fingers crossed for ATI getting stronger and ULi designers changing jobs :-].

Now that I have my car in use again, I went to some more distant hardware stores.

Here is what I found:

The upmost one is black tubing meant for electric installations. They now had black version of the tubing I have had for long. It’s a bit dim, but I guess some polishing will brighten it up. A lot easier than having to paint light hose and even if I paint it it’s better to have dim black show if paint peels of than murky white..

The rest is mostly cabling of different types: Pinkish red version of the speaker cable I had as orangish red this far - nice, I plan to mix them and use another one to mean 5V and another 12V.. These ones are really nice, they are very deep and bright even under normal light.

Then 1.5mm² thick blue cable and black cables of sizes 1.5mm², 2*0.75mm² and finally 3*1mm². I now have some 65 meters of electric cable in total - should be enough to wire a single case, especially since many of there are multi-threaded.

The bottommost item is spring for bending 20mm electric tubing. You can guess what a modder will do with that one.. On top of it is assortment of rubber grommets and finally two pieces of ball bearings. The last item is maybe not so obvious, but you will later see what I will use it for..

On the upper shroud front I bought some new types of filling/gluing/sealing materials. This one is meant to fill small gaps in window frames and furniture before painting them:

And then a lot of it applied to fill the gaps in the mold:

There is a nice feature in my jigsaw: you can attach vacuum cleaner to it. It helps to cool the saw and sucks the finesh (and most irritating) dust away right while sawing.

It also sounds and looks more macho :-D.

I also learned to cut more precisely. Jigsaw is like computer: it does what you command it to do, not what you want it to do ;-).

In addition to middle supports that mark the widest point, I also cut and installed border supports that mark the narrowest point:

As the base chipboard piece was some millimeters too small, I cut a piece from foamcore that matches exactly the size I aim at:

And then what was left was to fill the blanks with random pieces to reduce amount of bondo needed. Luckily my jigsaw base tilts:

Like a jigsaw puzzle, literally :-D . Too bad it’s 3D puzzle and the picture is only in my head, not in the pieces..

After gluing chipboard pieces to form the base structure I added a lots of bondo. It was supposed to be easy to sand and remain elastic, but what they didn’t mention is that it smells like poison.. If I ever have to use this kind of bondo again, I will first get mask that can filter gases. The smell was not just unpleasant, it actively made me feel sick. There is no way you can use this stuff inside, however good ventilation you have.

But after spending almost the whole 840 gram can, here is how it looked:

After letting it dry for some days I started the agonizing job of filing, sawing and sanding it down:

And here is the situation right now:

As you can see, the back looks quite good but the front still needs a lot of more bondo. It also needs some sanding before adding more bondo, but my hands are too sore to carry on today anymore. Phew.

Today I finally had time to visit art equipment store. Here is part of what I came out with, and my new nice (altough company owned) phone:

The big block is red clay for sculpting and ceramics. I plan to use it to make molds for smaller parts of the case. Clay is easy to model and then if more stiffness is needed, it can be easily replicated in plaster.

The paint jar is fluorescent white vinyl dye. You can make wild guesses what a modder can do with it :-).

The phone is nice: it’s Nokia 6630, one of the newest Series 60 phones. Compared to 7650 and 3660 I have used earlier it’s faster, sleeker, has more memory and has 3G. When you add into the mix lots of UI enhancements you get a really nice phone. I just have to buy new version of the WirelessIRC, the old one I have does not work with newer S60 phones.

Last night I tried to invent ways to create stronger feeling of half machine, half living thing. I got a vision of some kind of thin shapes stretching along some pipes, like some membrane fastening veins and muscles into bones.

Today I then took a rectangular piece of acrylic and took a look if I could make my vision come true in acrylic:

I clamped the acrylic between pieces of plank and used covered pliers to stretch it:

As you can see, I could make some pretty interesting shapes. I especially like the ones in images two and three. After that I rushed too fast and the acrylic melted too much. After that it was impossible to get nice smooth shapes, as the damaged part caused uneven behaviour in the piece.

But I think I achieved what I wanted: I proved that this method could produce certain shapes, I just have to be *very* careful with heating. I am straining the plastic here to the limits and any unevenness in heating will spoil the piece. The stretching really broke some sweat, since acrylic is very hard to stretch even when in plastic form and I had to keep the stretch until it had cooled hard again..

This left me breathless:

I immediately started to want to have sandcasting equipment :-).

If my current keyboard wasn’t yet on the list of items to replace, now it is:

It took few stray shots from hot air gun. Still works, but.. It was quite surprising how little heat was enough to deform it - acrylic didn’t even notice any warmth when keys were already bent.

On the project itself I continued making mold for upper shroud. First I printed out blueprint of the crosssection, glued it to foamcore sheet and made cutouts for main chipboard pieces:

Then I repeated the same for top blueprint. I had to do it twice, since I found out that the glue made paper stretch and thus the blueprint wasn’t anymore accurate. I fixed this by first attaching self-adhesive film to the paper and then gluing. The film kept paper in shape, while of course lengthening the drying time.

The film I used is marvelous stuff, it’s meant for covering books, and works wonders. Very stiff and very easy to lay evenly.

When glue had dried, I proceeded to saw out the raw shape:

After some filing we are close:

And sanding made last rough spots go away:

My hand after all the sanding with Dremel:

All the main pieces ready:

I then nailed the middle supports to the bottom piece:

Test fitting the top part. All ok:

I also finished cutting the first TT fan to final shape. Still needs sanding and polishing, but the shape is there. And aligns nicely with the top piece:

This has taken my time in past days:

From root@nelonen.pp.saunalahti.fi Thu Dec 15 02:36:16 2005
Subject: Fail event on /dev/md1:terra

This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm running on terra

A Fail event had been detected on md device /dev/md1.

Faithfully yours, etc.

It’s the RAID partition on our file server that contains all my personal work, pictures, texts, drawings etc. Luckily it’s RAID1 and only the other disc has failed now.. Backing up and then searching for a replacement drive.

But back to business. With help of some fine tutorials I continued my experiments in blueing metal parts of my project (mostly screws).

Using oil lamp as a heat source I heated a screw and then cooled it in water:

The result is not perfect, but getting there. I need more heat and more even heat source to get the fine blue I am aiming at. But even now the colored screw fits my vision better than the stock ones:

Before:

After:

I also tried blueing a chromed shower hose. It seems chrome is a lot easier to blue, it went blue on a temp that made iron parts just mildly brown:

Now I just need to find a place to get the whole hose evenly heated in high enough temp..

I also found a local gun store that sold me some blueing chemicals:

I plan to experiment with that, too. Such chemical blueing can not produce as fine results as blueing with real heat, but give my limited access to proper heat sources, it might do the job for this mod.

It’s anyway some 12-13 months until our new apartment which will have fireplace is ready and I will not want to wait that far with this mod..

We had an argument on SPCR forums over acoustic footprint of the Laing Delphi pump, so I felt compelled to make some head-to-head listening comparisons.

The contestants and some test equipment:

On the back the Laing Delphi 12VDC pump. On the front from left: PAPST 8412NGL 80mm fan (rated 0.045A / 12dB(A) but definitely louder), Thermaltake A2277 120mm UV fan (0.3A / 21dB(A)) and Silverstone FM121 120mm fan (0.4A / 17-39.5dB(A)).

Testing:

As it’s now daytime, I didn’t even try to measure absolute noise level, just make relative head-to-head comparisons. In order to eliminate vibration noise all contestants were placed on 50mm thick soft foam. Acoustics on the measurement room were quite challenging: walls are mostly bare and hard (concrete and similar).

Fully bleeding the small loop I made for testing the pump proved out to be quiet a challenge and there definitely was some additional noise due to miniscular airbubbles when I made listening tests.

But even on this level I had to go really close to the pump to hear any sound. Mostly the sound seemed to come from water turbulence, as the pump rushed the water throught the tight loop and fairly restrictive T piece used to bleed the system. In these ambient conditions (ambient sound level below 25dB(A), maybe as low as 20dB(A)) it was hard to hear the pump at all.

Results:

Pump against PAPST:

PAPST at 12V was clearly louder than the pump. It was by no means noisy, as it’s one of the most silent fans I have ran into, but it had some level of low-frequency clicking motor noise and air turbulence noise easily heard from distances below 1 meter. It was by no means noisy, and it would be very hard to hear if it was inside a properly
constructed case.

I have soldered a trimmer pot to the PAPST to be able to fine-tune the voltage level, but as I wanted to use only known voltage levels I set it to zero resistance.

Next step was to do the 7V trick and at this level PAPST fell clearly below the pump in noise level. I had to strain my hearing to hear either of the devices, but the pump was more easily audible at this test. My guesstimate is that the pump equals in noise PAPST volted to 9V.

Thermaltake fan against the pump:

Thermaltake at 12V was so much louder than the pump that were really was no contest. At 7V is was a tad louder than the pump, but this was maybe the closest pair in this test - it’s more up to your hearing, ambient noise and preferences which one you determine louder.

Next I managed to test that the Silverstone fan at 5V started cleanly and was more silent than TT@7V or pump@12V, but also didn’t provide much airflow to talk about.

At this point the ancient PSU I used to run the equipment shut itself down and didn’t start again. I have blocked it’s fan from running in order to eliminate it as a noise source and I guess something overheated… Oh well.

Anyway, the conclusion is: the Laing Delphi pump I own can honestly be defined as quiet. It equaled noisewise one of the most silent 80mm fans I have at around 9V and the most silent 120mm fan I have at 7V.

In the Laing Delphi there really is not much noise to talk about than the sound that water causes when is circulates in the tubing. I noticed some noise from the impeller, some infrequent very quiet clicks every now and then, but they were too quiet to be heard from any distance greater than 30cm and I think they might be due to poor bleeding of the system at this point.

EDIT:

This started to intrigue me and thus I dug out my digital multimeter. After confirming that it gave believable readings (some 12.05V on 12V rail and 5.03 on 5V rail), I tried to set the PAPST fan as close to the noise level of the pump as I could. I ended up going back and forth between 9V and 10V - they are so different on the type of the noise they produce it’s hard to define when they are even. At this point the loop had also been better bled, so most of the noise from the pump was impeller noise.

To get another opinion, I also let my girlfriend to have a say. She’s an engineer so while she’s not a silencing enthusiast, she has some knowledge about technical equipment.

I let her to set the PAPST to voltage level where the pump and the fan are equally noisy and she found it as hard as I did, but finally ended up at 10.3V. In relation to the TT fan she confirmed my results: TT@7V was a tad quieter than the pump, but you had to listen carefully to notice it. At TT@12V it was easy for her also to say that the TT was clearly louder.

Of course I didn’t tell her my own opinions beforehand to get non-biased measurements.

I managed to get blueprint for upper shroud mold intersection drawn:

Legend: Red boxes are fan+cushion intersections at various points of the mold. Black line marks the edge of the radiator+cover, blue boxes are scetches as how to cut chipboard for mold frame and grey ones are intersections of the finalized mold itself.

Have had problems sleeping this week so not much advancement in anything that needs brains. Anyway, the Swissflow SF800 that Nexxo kindly organized us arrived this week and I ran into some useful stuff in hardware store I haven’t visited before:

For those who do not know, SF800 is brilliant piece of hightech - it’s infrared-based flow meter, thus producing very accurate measurement without need for calibration and with minimal flow resistance.

The other goods are some bigger heatshrink tubing for my larger cable tubing and colored ammo for my gluegun. Latter one was something I didn’t knew existed but it will certainly come handy when gluing leds to red plastic or black MB nut covers.

Today I finally took the time to draw some blueprints with computer. Do you want it fast, or shall I do with computer, y’know :-) .

First I traced borders of the TT fan I have started cutting and scanned it:

Then using it as a model I drew blueprint for the upmost part of the upper shroud mold:

The previous vector drawing program I used heavily was Corel Draw 3.0 for Win 3.11, so there was quite a lot learning to get used to the modern ones..

Anyway, more drawings and less actual modding to come this week. I hope to get the mold finished by Sunday and get some of my friends then to help in the actual bending - it will be a tedious task indeed.

After spending some frustrating hours in bending the mobo tray rail spacers into better shape, I decided to relax a bit and put some thought on the mobo tray.

On the front side will be standoffs, but the backside, and especially the bottom layer of the tray, will have to keep nuts in place when motherboard is fastened or removed.

I started by drilling a 8mm hole for the M4 nut:

7 mm would maybe have been better, but all my bits of that size were of unsuitable type. OTOH, I would maybe have had to heat the hole to have the nut fit and there is a risk in that when working on narrow piece that needs to stay completely flat.

Some tape to make double sure the layers do not get glued to each other at this point:

As the hole was a bit on a large side, I decided to add something to keep the nut from falling even under moderate pressure. I wanted it to hide the glue, and I had this paint test piece lying around:

It’s actually made of the same smoke-colored acrylic than the rest of the pieces, but painted black from the other side. The painted side looks dumb, but the other side is nice and shiny:

Of course I didn’t invent this painting technique, but learned it from Chris Newman and his breathtaking Cinemedia PC project:

Then I drilled circular piece from that painted acrylic:

And applied some hot glue:

And presto:

It still needs polishing and such, but when judging the finish, remember that this the backside of the motherboard tray which will be seen only when I install motherboard, and even then only very briefly..

Finally I applied some hot glue to the front side, too:

I now let it dry overnight and then sand it level.

This weekend was very productive in modding front, altough I didn’t get any major parts finished.

On IRL side we went on to buy new apartment this week. The modding part of the news is that it is a two-story apartment and I will get a dedicated workshop at the upper floor - yay! Upper floor means there will be no neighbours on downstairs and as the whole building is just on the foundation stage, I can still order enough acoustic dampening to the walls to make it possible to mod all night long :-]. Additional bonus is that Leena, who is my fellow computer hardware enthusiast is living just half a kilometer away from the new apartment. Not bad, not bad at all.

We mutually agreed that I need a dedicated room for modding - I guess the half a year of acrylic dust in our nowadays shared study has softened her :-D.

Luckily also the next Tuesday is our Independence Day and thus free from work. More time for modding :-).

But back to business. I continued the mobo rails. Attaching spacers and rails:

These are my new drill bits. They are meant for wood and have spike in the center and blades at the outer edges. The spike does not really bite the acrylic, but melts it, but as the center will be anyway cut away, I can do with these:

Cutting M5 bolts to more correct length:

All assembled, for now:

At this point I noticed that yes, the spacing is right and the rails are parallel with each other, but in vertical direction they are not level. Oh well.. Luckily I have some extra spacers made exactly for this kind of problems. I believe some support on the other direction attached to the base will fix this, and then heatgun will take care that the corners stay in that position.

So into cutting the piece that will attach rails to the lower shroud cover:

Using spike to make sure the drill starts at the correct position:

To make sure all the pieces were perfectly aligned in vertical direction I first drilled just half of the hole and then used it to mark the same place to opposing piece:

Perfect alignment:

While I was working on the mobo rails, I had to remove the lower shroud top cover so I took a break and proceeded to finally cover the side openings.

First tracing the shape to the cardboard:

As I’m now entering the realm of bending acrylic into 3D shapes, I needed some sturdy material that’s easy enough to machine, cheap and does not melt under heatgun. As I have few pieces of chipboard lying around from the previous apartment renovation, it was selected to this task.

Shape copied from cardboard:

Sawing:

Quite nicely the correct shape, altough it looks a bit wrong in this pic:

As I do not have yet any real countersinking equipment, I used a big concrete bit to do some countersinking:

And the reason for countersinking: attaching the chipboard into plank to get it stay in place while stretching plastic over it:

Then I continued by bending foamcore sheet into the desired shape. Its purpose is to soften the chipboard a bit so that the acrylic sheet does not get any unnecessary marks:

This is a part I am a bit proud of. It was by no means easy to get this kind of shape bent:

And now that I was satisfied with the foamcore result, it was time to go for the real stuff:

And as you can see, the foamcore model is there as a buffer between the wood and the acrylic:

Oh my, not a bad fit for a first try:

This was pretty expectedly the part that required some more attention:

The heated acrylic behaves pretty similarly to soaken rawhide, so I knew how to deal with it - no little force will be enough to get it streched. Unfortunately while I tried to cushion my pliers, they sill left some marks:

Nevertheless, it’s now almost perfect fit. Notice the nice curved profile:

I think I can live with the plier marks; maybe add some piece of acrylic to cover it or something. Gotta think about it.