neilhart's Tower of Power (TOP for short) - a file server

[neilhart]

Weekly update -

Last Sunday I had a little set back where my table saw kicked a sheet metal bracket piece back at me. I was cut and bleeding from both thumbs and two fingers on my left hand. Not much pain but enough blood to get my wife all worked up and pressing me to go to the emergency room. However I washed up and applied a good number of "bandaids" and took it easy the rest of the day.

I did make some progress this week.

Finished the brackets to mount the Icy Dock unit to the plate that sits on top of the modded PSU.

Then finished cutting the motherboard mounting plate and mounting brackets to secure it to the top of the Icy Dock unit.

Then cut the motherbaord IO access hole in the rear plate.

Added the standoffs to the MB mounting plate and a clearance cut for the tang of a GPU.

And cut the GPU access slot in the read plate.
.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.
Next up is locating and cutting the window hole for the latch lever followed by a circular cutout for a 120 mm rear exhaust fan (or 120 mm AIO water cooler rad).

I have the front portion of the core set aside for the moment. I am seriously considering a mod that would remove the front panel power switch and IO ports from this panel. With this mod I would patch the front panel switch area with Apple mesh salvaged from previous projects.

That would then drive me to go ahead and finalize my idea for a right side control panel. More on that at another time.

Good modding,
neil

 

[neilhart]

Worked on patching out the front control area.

.

.

.

.
The reassembled the core with the modded top shelf and modded slider latch assembly.
.

.

.

.
More to come. Good modding,
neil

 

[neilhart]

More:

I found that my mod to right side frame frame caused an interference with the optical drive mount where the plastic release handles were blocked by the added thickness to the latch bar area. This can be seen in the last photo above. So back to a non-interfering patch... more filling, sanding, painting...
.

.
Here is a chassis photo where I am planning the left panel cuts. Most of the panel goes away...
.

.
And then I fabbed up a chassis base plate (going without the G5 PM handle loops).
.

.

.

.
Then I have started cutting the left side panel-supports...
.

.
And a photo of my work table with parts everywhere with many pieces started but not completed... Again, so many parts depend upon on the form of other parts that are also not complete. What a mess!
.

.
More to follow.

Good modding,
neil

 

[Wolfie81]

I honestly dont know how you dedicate yourself to these difficult projects..
Well done!

 

[neilhart]

I honestly dont know how you dedicate yourself to these difficult projects..
Well done!

I am wired such that I need problems to solve. I have been building my personal computers sense the early or mid '80s and the TOP project was the most complex one that I could take on with the minimum of additional spending.

And I am working this project in parallel with beta testing a Haswell system on 10.8.5 and 10.9.

Good modding,
neil

 

[neilhart]

Another week,

Located the position for the rear mounted 120 mm fan and set out to cut the hole for it.
.

.

.

.
And finished up the base plate with USB2&3 ports.

.

.

.
Then assembled the slide latch (again). Found using tape to aid my fat fingers holding the small parts makes short work of the PITA reassembly task.

.

;

.
And the assembly continues, working up the cabling and a front fan for the Icy Dock. Going with a single fan on the Thermaltake Water2.0 Performer as the bench testing indicated that two fan just made more noise. Here is the in process case on my work table.
.

.

.

.

.
I am always amazed at how much time it takes to accomplish so little.

More to come. Good modding,
neil

 

[kiwisincebirth]

Another week ... I am always amazed at how much time it takes to accomplish so little.
More to come. Good modding,
neil

Neil. You understate what you are doing here. When you started sectioning cases, you have crossed a bridge between doing a simple case mod, to a complete scratch case build using G5 cases for both materials and inspiration. This work takes time.

Your last photo (left hand side of case) was very interesting, not what I expected at all. I cannot wait to see where you take this. Glad your hand has recovered.

Kiwi

 

[Wolfie81]

This looks amazing. I agree, this kinda of modding is on a different level.

Im surprised you have uses for all these mods of late!

 

[neilhart]

Just a note here about checking and then checking again...

I miss-wired my power cable to the Icy Dock. How simple is this? Any way because one connector body is at a right angle I inadvertently swapped the 12V yellow wire with the 5V red wire and did not catch my mistake... so I smoked the electronics on one hard disk.
.
Here is the blow out!
.

.

What a blow to my ego! I will see if I can recover my drive; this is my system drive that I had just built to 10.8.4.

Good modding
neil

 

[neilhart]

And more:

Working on cable dress and air flow through the Icy Dock. As it turns out, the lower section has air flow from back to front and the top section it is from front to back. Why? The temps on the hard drives are better with the reverse air flow.

Then I worked on the control panel location that is now going to be on the right side. This is a little tricky in that the panel will be mounted to be nearly flush the new right side panel (looking through a window in the right side panel). And the new right side panel will also be removable via the rear latch handle.
.

.

.

.

.

.
And worked some smaller details such as switching out the green and yellow PC LEDs, for blue ones.

More to follow.

Good modding,
neil