CM CosmosII - Eagle

[dmcgrath]

Another quick update.

That first door took another full day or so to get to a finished state.

I'll say it again, even though this wasn't my first choice of lighting effect I'm extremely happy with how it turned out.

And here's the door in it's nearly finished state (provided you ignore the one missing piece on the top corner.

Just for ease of installation I installed the plug wire inside the inner door handle area.

Due to the brightness of the LED's you cannot really see what I've done here. I felt like I needed to show you how I go about covering up the light area. You could see it in the earlier post but I didn't really explain it.

What I've done here is; place a piece of masking tape over the LED strip after it's installed.

Then I marked out the lighted areas around each light.

I then remove that tape and transfer it to a strip of the aluminum sheet. Using a common hole punch was the easiest and cleanest way to make holes for the lights.

I cut about 6000 (maybe less) relief cuts along the edges of the aluminum sheet. It has to bend in two different directions and still give me metal to metal contact on the door side.

I then cut an additional 6000 (or so) relief cuts along the outer edge and fold it up along the wooden wing part.

Cover it all in metal.

And then I re-test to make sure it lights up still. (I am paranoid about that. if one light burns out, it may not be terrible but I don't want to take that chance.)

I have to remove excess epoxy out of some of the joints, re-glue some of the areas that didn't hold as well as I need, and then some texturing work with my brass cup brush on my Dremel, which disintegrated about half way through (so I need to find more of those).

Back to my eagle facsimile. I have finally settled on a head shape. I had made this one out of the same foam as previous attempts. After getting something that was looking fairly good as a shape out of clay as my guide. Again, the head I built and glued on to here, was too high. So I sawed the head back off, cut about an inch off the height and glued it back on.

The good news is; I did like the shape of it though.

This time around I opted for an eye ridge, with no actual eye area.

I even carved a place out for the control panel to go back in on the top.

And a final shot done by my kid.

Thanks for looking!

[pcjunkie209]

Looking good!!

[footman]

Wow, I love what you have done with the aluminium plates. Great work.

[dmcgrath]

Thanks for the encouragement guys. I've only got a little way to go and then final assembly and pics to come. Only a couple days!

[dmcgrath]

Well here we are with an actual working eagle head modeled on the top of the case, finally!

As soon as I finished with that I had to begin grinding and sanding all the parts to get them to fit back together better.

Who knew the clearance tolerances wouldn't allow for some extra thickness of aluminum skinned to the outside of the case?

I did have some success getting it to fit all back together.

AND, I did have some failures as well. This really hurt me quite badly.

The front door area alongside the hinge just grabbed hold of all my hard work and proceeded to separate it from it's mounting.

It did it to the door as well, but a little less. Repairing this took me most of the rest of the evening, and I had to go back to grinding it back down to a suitable form. It still isn't perfect, and I'm afraid that if the doors get opened up too quickly it will happen again. Especially after it gets shipped across the country to Cooler Master's events.

Getting it all worked out took a major chunk of time and I had very little left to give.

I did manage to get the USB port cluster installed where I wanted to. And it turned out pretty nice, thankfully.

The eagle beak is really hanging down there, please watch out if you are around this thing. It's about the only really sharp thing on the case, I've blunted it but I didn't want to go any further and risk destroying the tip.

I tried to take some pictures of the case after the texturing. But due to lack of time and experience, I'm having trouble shooting a decent batch. This is one of the best ones I could come up with.

Some low light shots to show off the wing lighting again.

And from the rear.

As I was putting the aluminum chips onto the eagle they all converged to the final piece, it was pretty close to a star shape under that area, so i just made a star and placed it over it. Seemed like a good place for one.

This is directly behind the head, where I wanted the switch panel to be. In the rush one was not able to get sent to me on time and I hope that they will be able to manage to install it when the case arrives to it's final destination.

The case is now all packed up and ready for it's voyage.

**My final thoughts on this case mod.**

This has been a learning experience for me in so many ways. (And some of it I wish it wasn't.)

Estimated aluminum used was ALL of the aluminum I ordered. I honestly have so little left I think I couldn't even create one soda can's worth of material. It was approximately 9 feet long by 2 feet wide. I really thought I was ordering a lot MORE than I needed. But it turns out, it was just enough.

I prepared the chips by doing this procedure.;

-I cut the metal sheet into strips.

-Then I cut the strips into square and rectangular shapes.

-I put approximately 8 to 14 rivet dents per chip and then rolled them flat.

-I did this about 600 times. (6000 rivets!!!? Wow!)

I estimate I have spent about 300 hours on this project. Some of it was just experimenting, and some of it was research or even just a little but of spinning my wheels. But, that's all part of the learning what I can and cannot do with the materials I chose.

I used and discarded about 50 feet of fiber optic cable. I have about 50 feet more that I didn't use, and that will have to go elsewhere some day.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the result. I really hope that Cooler Master is happy as well. I also hope they can get some decent pictures of the case.

Stepping out on a proverbial ledge like I did, and picking exotic materials, really has it's ups and downs.

I hope you enjoyed the mod and thanks for looking!

Dan

[bob808]

Wow.. That's really quite an achievement! It turned out really nice. Thats definately one of a kind. I for one would like to see some more pictures of the finished product. Hopefully CM will have one of their professional photographers take a whole slew of shots and post them somewhere I can find them. Great work dmcgrath!