WING X99 | CNC-fräst scratch-bygge! (Slutgiltiga bilder postade!)

När man ändå är i farten!

First off, changing the threads on both radiators. These are 6-32 and I am going to use M4.

Get the right size drill!

This is a really nice function to have on your drill press. You can set a maximum depth. This is very useful while drilling radiators since you will not puncture it by drilling to far.

Tapitapptapp! Remember, not to far!

Muuuuuch better!

Quickly making a board for the button assembly and the illuminated front logo!

Manually jogged the end mill and taped the board to the aluminium sheet.

Separating one piece the circuit from the other.

Made this photo booth that I can fold down and is basically as big as the bottom piece.

I can fit my soft boxes and this also works as work light.

Gets really nice and bright when I work, and I can angle these to change the lights either for work or when taking photos.

Since this is not compatible with the EK-monoblock and I really like the cover I thought that I could do some slight modding.

Cut it here, and drained the fluid inside.

Sealing it up with some super glue.

All done, just need to rest for a while and a few dots of black marker from a pen.

Changed the RAM heat sink so I can fit the monarch ram block. This is a PITA since the original heat sinks are glued/taped to the ram. And they do not come of easy, even with a heat gun...

They sure look nice though!

Ram-block mounted!

Full cover mono-block and gpu-blocks also mounted!

Looking real nice!

Here you can see the mod that allowed the cover to stay in place!

Looks very good in my opinion.

Strix GPU-block and backplates mounted.

These sure are good looking!

Water cooled SSDs!

Wheeww, a huge relief that being done with that. Just tested the system and it posts, and detects all the RAM, GPUs etc! Puhhh!

This is the base for the GPU-connector block.

These are very small o-ring slots for the GPU-blocks

Had to use a 1mm end mill for these.

Doing the bigger O-ring slots for the connector plate. I am using 2mm O-ring string and I am making 2.5 mm wide and 1,35 mm deep slots for them.

Base part completed. Water channel slots are 13mm wide and 5mm deep. Equaling about the same area as a 10mm ID hard tubing pipe.

Do you see the suffering I put myself trough to document this! Crap all over the workshop! And these gets a static charge and stick to everything! I could be using the dust shoe but then the video and picture production would suffer!

Shieeeeee, this sticks to everything...

Yeah, everywhere...

This is the Top part of the big connector plate.

Profile all cut.

Countersinking!

All done, except for some engraving.

Did a test of the engraving and also the sphere for the pump tops.

Turned out nicely so I proceeded to the real pieces.

First up, the engraving

Doing this inverted from the back side produces this very neat effect. Looks super good in my opinion.

Now it is time for the base of the big connector plate.

Res being milled, ohhhh yes!

Really pleased with the quality of the cuts. Time to flip it around and do scary stuff to it!

Don't want to ruin this now. So much work put into this and I was very nervous for the pump spheres.

Turned out great! Could not hope for better. Now I just have to tap A LOT of M4 and 1/4" holes.

daaaaaang, these are sexy!

Basically ALL parts that need to be milled are done now. I just hope I did not forget something or screw things up

Time to put everything back together and see if it fits again!

All the parts from the anodization. Not cleaned 100% yet but it looks very good and even!

I thought that I would start at the bottom. Fastening the rubber. Ended up using contact glue. Tried a lot of glues and this was the one the came out on top.

Lets start by roughing up one side of the neoprene rubber.

This is how the side looks before sand paper

And after

Same thing here, this is a very smooth surface and it is hard for the glue to stick to it.

After a few minutes of sanding. This is kinda hard to sand since sand paper is made from aluminium oxide and when you are sanding anodized aluminium you are sanding something that is about as hard as the sand paper basically. But you can quite easily scratch it.

Contact glue on both surfaces. Wait until you can touch it with your hands and its "dry". Usually takes about 5-10 mins depending on layer thickness.

Make sure you position it right the first time, there is no taking it of when you put it down. Then it is stuck there good and you will have a HUGE mess if you try and remove it.

Done! Turned out great. Really nice to have a solid base for the case that will reduce noise and make it stay in place much better.

After that it was time to glue the neodymium magnets. I used loctite 638 for this and when this have dried it is in there really good.

Here you can see two magnets in place for the button assembly. I did all the rest of the magnets the same way. No more pictures of that though. This glue is really nasty smelling and not nice for your skin, so I used gloves and did not want to get any on the camera sooooo.... You get the procedure

Time to try to mount some acrylic case pieces. This is the mid section of the "light box". A 10mm thick acrylic piece with carved lines.

Here you can see the patterns. Just lightly scratched with a V-bit in the CNC.

This pattern "catches" the light that you put in from the sides. And Illuminates more even on the surface.

You want a reflector to enhance the light. This is the base.

Adhesive chrome/silver tape stuff I got from a hobby store.

Cut it out with a exacto knife.

There we go! Just need to test it with some leds!

Put on the front and I am really pleased so far!

Getting really excited!

Put on the translucent white plexi

Here it is with the leds! The protective film is still on but you get the idea, a clean even white surface that illuminates the inside of the case.

Okay this got me really excited. DAMN worked out even better than I thought. Just a hasty mount and tried it out. Have not even polished the acrylic yet. Just powering each node of the led strip here with a 12v input. So I can only do R, G and B separate. But still gives you an idea of how it will look!

That is all for now, next up will be the bottom compartment and cable management for fans and leds.

@ZpnK hehe

Doing the bottom compartment as far as I can right now.

This is the fan I had to do some modifications on for the water cooling to be able to fit without it being to tight.

Mounting fans and trying to figure out how to do all this the best way.

Decided to mount it as it is supposed to be so I can get a better idea.

I did not want to sleeve the fans. I did that the last time and it was bothersome and did not really add to the aesthetics. And here they will not ever show. Non sleeved cables can look much better than sleeved in some cases and also have much smaller footprint.

Mounted the PSU.

Decided to keep the full lengths of the fans and do a neat splitter with some clean cable routing. Making it easy to replace a fan IF there is a malfunction or anything like that.

Designed a simple fan splitter on a board.

Some soldering later

Hot glue is the solution to a lot of things

Isolated and protected.

Just some cleaning up with an exacto knife and we are good to go.

Put them on the fan with some hot glue. Really sticks well and you should still be able to pry it away if needed.

Did the cables in this neat row. I really like the cables that comes with these fans. Flat wire is really good when it comes to management.

Really pleased with how it turned out. Really neat, took some time though

Drain port that is easily accessible in the front. Rotating fittings make it easy to point downwards or outwards and drain fluids when needed. Also put a inline temp sensor to monitor the water temperature.

Nice and neat, just the way I like it!

Mounted the leds! The red wire is gone from the leds, even if it does not show it bothered me later so I switched that one to a black also.

Mounted the magnetic fan filters from demcifilter. They are really neat and you can order them to custom sizes and shapes.

Really easy to remove and clean.

Now it is time to progress to the next compartment before I can finish up the bottom.

Mounted the motherboard plate and IO parts.

Put in the pump covers and the RGB leds that will light the acrylic line that goes around the pump back.

Did not plan on this RGB part. But when the foot looked that nice I really wanted to expand on that. Tested with this and it looked amazing. I like the RGB-thing going on right now. But the most important thing for me is that it is balanced. And that you can turn it off when ever you want to. That is really important.

The translucent plexiglas is mounted and I have removed the protective film. It looks really clean and nice in my opinion and I am glad I went with this type of design instead of a regular plain mid section in aluminium.

Played around and mounted "tree" to see how it will look and I am really really please with how balanced this is (for me at least). BUT, I am getting myself ahead quite a bit. Next up is no small task, sleeving...

About time to mount some components. These have been sitting on my shelf long enough...

Like a glove! Always a bit nervous when you make scratch builds and make custom IO that it will not fit. But it was really nice and snug!

GPUs and SSDs mounted!

Here is a neat tool I designed. The thing I hate the most about sleeving is stretching the sleeve so that you get a really tight fit around the cable. That hurts my hands bad after a while, and it is not like the other burning and bending etc does not hurt. And at the same time you need to pinch the cable so it does not go back. This is my first rev of a tool to aid me in this. And I must say it works quite nicely.

Here you can see the sleeve pulled through the rolls causing it to tighten around the cable. And when you stop pulling the sleeve stay in place and does not go back. And a stretched sleeve looks much much better than a non stretched sleeve.

This is such a mess. I don't like to sleeve, I think it is tedious and I get nervous that I have done something wrong all the time and checks everything like 5 times over and over...

Okay, a few days later I am done with 90% of the cables. My fingers hurt, I have burned myself on the arm and hand (very small table in the apartment) since I put down my arm and hand on the very hot gas touch 2 times... My fault but lets blame the very limited space

This sleeve gets very stiff when streched and it is a pain to bend, but on the other hand it looks amazing and it is really tight, much tighter than the MDPC sleeve that is very good quality.

Okay now, how the hell do I fit this into here. I originally planed this with 18 AWG wire and much softer sleeve. Now with this much tighter sleeve and 16 AWG wire the cables do not like to stay in place...

I really like how the GPU comb turned out. I wanted to make something that goes with the same theme and lines as the build. Turned out better than I thought it would.

Decided to make the pump connect inside the pump house.

Shortened the original cables of the D5 pumps

I ended up using hot glue to be able to get the cables to stay in place. Was impossible otherwise. Either way, I only used hot glue on places where you cant see it. So no hot glue what so ever will ever be visible. I originally was against using any kind of glue "since then I cant remove the cables" then I remembered that I have threaded each individual cable through holes so that is pretty much a permanent installation... So then I was fine with it. If you do something like this though I recommend that you are really careful to not get any glue where you don't want it.

A small amount of hot glue to fix the bottom layer of the cables did the trick. Really neat.

Here you can see the whole tree.

Now I just need these cables to conform to MY reality, GET IN LINE!!!

That is more like it! Will leave it like this for a day or two and they will stay more or less in place when I remove the scrap acrylic pieces.

Looks really neat but what a pain to do. Don't think I would have done them visable if I knew how much time I would have to spend on them. I would at least have done some changes in the design if I knew I was going to use 16AWG and this thicker sleeve. This could have been much easier than it was.

Time for a very big moment. Plugged in the cable and put on the switch on the PSU. Time to boot for the first time since removing every single cable and every connector and putting them back in again. THe amount of money that rides on that all the cables are correctly connected is HUGE.

Here we go...

The sweet, sweet boot screen! What a HUGE relief, it posted just fine into bios and all GPUs etc are detected. Had to turn it off after about a minute though since I have no cooling on yet. But this is such a relief.

Quickly fixed up the cables on the front and straightened them up a bit (they need a bit more work to be perfect but I will do that later)

The foot is not mounted back again since I might need to screw in the fill ports from underneath when I connect the custom blocks.

Another quick boot with the lights connected also.

Starting to look a lot like the renders! I am really excited now! Now I just need to polish the acrylic parts, make orings, leak test the blocks and test the pump tops. And If all that works I am basically 99% done with the case. Just some minor things like the power on button that needs to be fixed!

A Video of how the sleeving tool works and how I do my sleeving:

Polishing and sanding the acrylic

I got this kit. You basically use sand paper, and then you use number 3, number 2 and then clean with number 1.

I recommend using microfiber cloths. And remember to NOT use the same cloth for different number bottles. You do not want to use the same cloth for number 2 as you did for number 3!!!

Before you go with the number 3 you will have to do the basic work with sand paper. I went from 240 grit to --> 400 --> 800 ---> 1500 ---> 2000 and then I went with number 3. That produced a really nice result.

Did all the sanding in this container filled with moving water. It really helps when you have running water when you polish. At least I think so.

This is how it can look when you start.

Sanded to 2000 grit.

Polished with nr 3, 2 and then cleaned with nr 1. I was a bit lazy with this part since it really does not matter.

Sanded this uneven with 60 grit. The idea being that it will diffuse the light and give a more even illumination around the base of the case.

Can you spot the difference?

Clear like glass!

Rinse and repeat, same procedure as before.

Finally done with the polishing. This took a LOT of hours to do, and it is really draining work, both mentally and physically. You need to push really hard when you polish with the cloth and sanding seems like it never ends. Going through all those stages of different grit papers was tedious work. But in the end the result was all worth it!