Hello Everyone! It's been a bit of a delay since my last update... had a few weddings to attend followed by a delightful Windows 8.1 upgrade corrupting my storage drive  ... so things have been busy. Fortunately, I'm back in business now, and have make a few bits of progress on the reservoir!In all previous photos, I just had the reservoir and housing 'sitting' on the midplate in the drive bay area, not really attached to anything as shown in this picture:  I played with a few ideas on how best to attach the reservoir, but figured the easiest method would be to have some supports attached to the sides and use the slots in the drive bay with some screws to mount it in place. First, I measured a few times and cut myself some acrylic blocks with the appropriate counter-angle to my reservoir:   There we are, nice and snug. I got the acrylic bars about where they were going to be, then marked off some spots to drill holes into them:  Tossed them in the trusty drill press / vise:  After the holes were drilled, I hammered in some of those little "press fit" screw housings so that I had some metal-threaded 'taps' into the bars, then screwed them into place on the drive cage:   A top-down view of the housing/supports as they will be once glued together:  Next, I had to 'actually' glue my housing together. As you can see from the above picture, up until this point it was in two pieces: the sides, then the top/tube/bottom. I glued them together using some of my IPS Weld-on #3 so that they would maintain a nice 'neat' seam. After that, I sanded the face of the reservoir housing so that all the edges were even and such. I left myself some slack knowing that I would need to even up the edges as getting them perfectly exact was near impossible. As you can see below, the face sticks out just a bit pre-sanding:  The easiest way I found to get a nice even flat face was to tape a sheet of sandpaper onto a board and rub the face of the reservoir housing back and forth over it:  After the face was nice and flush, I powered up the hot glue gun and ran a few beads of hot glue on the 'angled' face of each supporting beam while it was still attached to the drive cage, then seated the completed reservoir and housing against it, making sure the face was flush with the case. After that, I ran a few beads of hot glue around the support beams to make sure they held well... this will get a bit heavy when it's full of water, and I don't want it deciding to give up the ghost under the weight after everything is all together.   The glue job is a bit ugly, but fortunately once my case is completely assembled it's impossible to see this area. In fact, I'll be hiding cables and such here, so I really don't mind if it's a little ugly in the name of stability.  A view of the mounted reservoir from the sides:  Nice and clean looking!  With the reservoir all put together, I now finally have all of the 'hardware' for my cooling loop in place! Huzzaw!  Now, I just have to do the tubing and the 'functional' part of the water loop is complete! Obviously, I won't do that until almost last... so much more to do before that!  Anyway... that killed about two weekends getting the reservoir housing done... looking at the pictures back to back it seems like about 15 minutes of work. That's how these things go, I've come to find... the small stuff takes the longest!  Anyway... on to the next big piece of my case. I'm in the planning and design phases of it now... can you guess what it is?  Until next time!  |