cAPSLOCK's Wooden Case

Enclosures and acoustic damping to help quiet them.

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cAPSLOCK
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Location: Switzerland

cAPSLOCK's Wooden Case

Post by cAPSLOCK » Tue Jun 27, 2006 12:05 am

Well I'm certainly not the first to want to make a wooden case :lol: But it just offers you more flexibility, in particular I wanted:

-car-style air filters
-only 120mm fans
-space to easily suspend [enclosed] hard drives
-good airflow

I used these principles in this case:

-positive pressure: makes it easier to filter the air
-separate psu/hdd channel
-no openings on the front or sides

Well here's the drawing (all measurements are in mm) [note: sorry the thumbnail is invisible, you'll have to click on it]:

Image

You can see that there are two 120mm fans on the back, and that all the air goes out the top with backwards-pointing louvers (to avoid sound going to the front where I'll be sitting). The harddrives are suspended, and the psu will be on silicone cushions. I'm not sure what fan mounting I'm going to implement, but it'll be soft mounted. The filter will be attached on the back by a bracket that's not shown here. One final note: the motherboard is upside down so that the CPU is at the bottom, in front of the intake fan.

Here's a pic of some of the non-wood components I've got together for this project:

Image

The machine that's going in this case is my current one (see sig). The reason why this case accomodates a full ATX mobo and hotter components is that I'm planning on getting a more powerful pc towards the end of this year, and using this case for it.

Comments and suggestions are, of course, very welcome :)

Bluefront
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Post by Bluefront » Tue Jun 27, 2006 2:01 am

Good luck with your project....my wood case is about 1/2 done. I suppose yours will be a tower type case. I suspect that will be more difficult to cool than a horizontal mother-board setup.

Rather than louvers on the top, in my Aria project I just slanted the top and put a vertical vent at the top rear. Works great. The positive case pressure acts like a fan to blow the heat out. My wood project will use a similar technique.....maybe with a custom slot fan on the top to help the airflow at high temps.

Aria top vent using positive pressure.

Image

nici
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Post by nici » Tue Jun 27, 2006 2:43 am

Damn, i must be the only one that wants a wooden case but haven´t started building it yet... :lol:

Looks like a nice plan. I like the look of the louvers :) You would want to stop stuff from falling in there though :wink:

I would skip the floppy drive at the front. I use mine so rarely that i only connect it to the computer when i need it, wich is about once a year when flashing a BIOS.. You can do that thru windows too with some hardware. Or if you still want to have it in there, mount it inside the case and open the side when you need it.

I think Bluefront´s latest filter would suit this case very well :)

cAPSLOCK
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Post by cAPSLOCK » Tue Jun 27, 2006 5:03 am

I chose the louvers because the case is already huge, and I didn't want to add too much height, and I wanted to keep the airflow as unrestricted as possible, in any case, if I find too much noise is escaping from the top, it's not too hard to add on a muffler.

I don't think too much stuff will be falling into the louvers, since I have my case under my desk.

For the floppy drive, you've got me wondering now :| I still like to have it there to write floppies to save other people's systems. I was also thinking of getting one of those floppy/card reader combos, that would look slick. Well I dunno, I might have to do a coin toss on this one :lol:

I have already got the filter (check the second pic) and it should work fine.

nici
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Post by nici » Tue Jun 27, 2006 5:30 am

I don´t doubt your filter, in fact it looks pretty much like the stock filter in my car.. wich was replaced by a cotton filter :wink:

A floppy/card reader combo is a good excuse to keep the floppy :) I wanted a smooth front on my lian-li, so i don´t even have a power button on the case :mrgreen:

cAPSLOCK
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Post by cAPSLOCK » Wed Jul 12, 2006 5:59 pm

I am now at work on my case in my father's workshop. Here are some pictures:

Image
The four main planks of the case.

Image
The back panel, viewed from inside.

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The front panel, viewed from the inside. The bars are for the PSU support area. (they are not glued in yet)

Image
The holes for the front ports.

This would be very difficult to do if my father wasn't an experienced hobby carpenter, with a garage full of usefull tools.

PS: Could somebody tell me the width of a 24pin ATX plug? I'm a few thousand kilometers away from my parts stash, and I need to make a hole for cable routing from the PSU area to the mobo. :lol:

Beel
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Post by Beel » Thu Jul 13, 2006 3:02 am

My phantom plug is ~52mm (just a hair over 2 inches) at its widest

cAPSLOCK
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Post by cAPSLOCK » Sun Jul 16, 2006 12:02 pm

Thanks Beel. In the end I just made a semicircular cut in the side of the separating wall that only the cables need to fit through.

I'm now more or less finished with the cutting and drilling, here are some pictures:

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Here's the exhaust that will be the top of the case.

Image
Here is the case assembled but not glued yet.

I'm going to take the pieces back to Switzerland and glue them there. I'll do several layers of grain filler, undercoat and black paint to get a nice smooth shiny black finish (hopefully). I still haven't got the stainless steel "vandal proof" button, nor drilled the hole for it... I think I'll buy it at a ridiculously high price in Switzerland. (I've looked in Radioshack, various car parts stores and various do-it yourself stores in the US, no luck so far).

I don't have the metal mobo tray and cd cage here so I'll see that when I get home, but the LED's, front ports and filter fit perfectly :) (the filter is screwed onto the back with a simple wooden frame that isn't shown here)

McBanjo
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Post by McBanjo » Sun Jul 16, 2006 2:08 pm

Nice :-)
This will be a very intresting project to follow.

cAPSLOCK
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Post by cAPSLOCK » Sun Jul 30, 2006 11:25 am

Well I'm back home now, I only had some minor damage to my pieces of wood. I've been sanding and filing the case to fit all the components and make a smooth finish, so there hasn't been much visible progress, but I made another test assembly (which I'll probably glue tomorrow unless it rains). This time I had all the metal components of my case that I put in as a test, but haven't screwed in yet. You can also see the filter with the wooden frame just behind the case. It will just be attached over the two fan holes with screws.

Image

Image

Bluefront
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Post by Bluefront » Sun Jul 30, 2006 1:21 pm

Not bad at all....starting to look like a computer. But wow, it looks heavy. I hope you don't intend to move it much. Have you considered wheels of some sort? Just how wide will it end up?

cAPSLOCK
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Post by cAPSLOCK » Mon Jul 31, 2006 1:27 am

It's a pretty huge case, I was considering 18mm side panels because I wanted to make a solid case with no vibrations, but I put in 10mm because it was just getting too wide. The only way I could make this case less wide is by using smaller fans. So here are the approximate dimensions:
581mm (H) x 480mm (D) x 235mm (W) this is including the louvers that stand about 35mm above the case itself, and the filter on the back as well.

As a comparison the Silverstone TJ-07 and the Antec P180 look small:
TJ07: 560mm (H) x 565mm (D) x 220mm (W)
P180: 540mm (H) x 507mm (D) x 205mm (W)

The only dimension in which my case is smaller is the depth, but remember I need to leave an empty space behind the case since the intakes are on the back. I have measured the space under my desk and it will fit, so I guess it's not much of a problem.

As for the weight, carrying the planks in a stack felt surprisingly light, but it's just an impression. I don't move my computer much anyway. I did consider putting wheels on it, but that would make it too tall, I want a decent gap between the top of the case and the bottom of my desk, since the exhaust is on the top. What I think I'm going to do is put some of those teflon sliders on the bottom (the sort you use on the feet of chairs), so then I can slide the case around, and it also gives a gap to get my fingers under the case for when I need to pick it up.

McBanjo
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Post by McBanjo » Mon Jul 31, 2006 2:59 am

Since you have the cables sticking out of the back then intake area isn't much of an issue, it fixes itself :-)

Any idea when it will be ready? I want to see some temps ;-)

Bluefront
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Post by Bluefront » Mon Jul 31, 2006 3:01 am

I can't tell from the photos, but concerning the intake fans/filter. Is there any space between the filter and the fan blades? From previous designs/attempts with that sort of restrictive filter, you need at least a 25mm air gap between the fan and filter. This gives each fan the ability to draw air through the whole area of the filter material.

Good luck with it....

cAPSLOCK
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Post by cAPSLOCK » Mon Jul 31, 2006 1:35 pm

I hadn't thought of that problem, but there is about 8mm between the rubber lip and the paper filter material, then there's the 18mm of the case and add a couple of mm for the silicone decoupling I'll add on after I'm done painting. Should work out I guess.

McBanjo, I'm sorry I won't have any temps to show since my CPU doesn't have a temp diode, nor my HDD, not sure about the GPU. I'm not actually building this case for an improvement in temperatures, but for an improvement in silence. My current case has the HDD in a cdrom bay, with soundproofing that has gaps in it, so some high pitched sound leaks out. This case should solve that. I was also building this case because I was thinking of buying a new computer round christmas this year, but I'm having second thoughts on that now, if I could only get my hands on a northwood... :)

Anvar
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Post by Anvar » Mon Jul 31, 2006 1:39 pm

A quick question, I notice a couple of people in here are building wooden cases, I was wondering, do you do it purely for looks, or is there a silence issue to this as well? Will a pc generally be quieter in a wooden case?

McBanjo
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Post by McBanjo » Mon Jul 31, 2006 2:41 pm

cAPSLOCK wrote:McBanjo, I'm sorry I won't have any temps to show since my CPU doesn't have a temp diode, nor my HDD, not sure about the GPU. I'm not actually building this case for an improvement in temperatures, but for an improvement in silence. My current case has the HDD in a cdrom bay, with soundproofing that has gaps in it, so some high pitched sound leaks out. This case should solve that. I was also building this case because I was thinking of buying a new computer round christmas this year, but I'm having second thoughts on that now, if I could only get my hands on a northwood...
Silence and lower temp seems to go hand in hand sometimes (bether temp is lower airflow and thereby lower noise). Temps are a good measurements when it comes to airflow atleast. Perhaps you can borrow a friends computer with tempdiods and see?
Oh well, still nice to see some fresh ideas :-)
Anvar wrote:A quick question, I notice a couple of people in here are building wooden cases, I was wondering, do you do it purely for looks, or is there a silence issue to this as well? Will a pc generally be quieter in a wooden case?

Wood damper sound as well as having (almost?) no vibrations. Being nice to look at is more a nice feature rather than a goal.
Wood is also cheap and probibly the easiers material to work with. And even a thick wood-case is rather light. My case fully installed weights about 15kg, I think it was 6kg empty.

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