So, I have here three cases in front of me.

20 Dremel wheels

two 100+ piece Dremel accessory sets

Air-conditioned work environment

My favorite Chinese dinner

And the insatiable desire to manipulate metal. Should I take another crack at the original Choppers Mod that I botched up? I found a replacement sidepanel for that case, which is one of the three cases up on the operating table. Should I do something car or automotive related? Lord knows I love cars, and I certainly know enough about them. Maybe something simple? Maybe something unorthodox?

Off to defile a case, be back in a bit

Please break out the camera and take a lot of Pic's

I have decided on a victim, the original case from this thread

http://www.forumapex.com/project_wor...ect_probe.html

Sat in a corner for months and now I have decided to finish it.

Theme will be the original Choppers mod with a maltese Iron Cross for a window. Lighting will be red.

Case is already pretty much painted, all the drivebays are done in black already. I may have the panels powdercoated by my paint guy who does my bikes.

Hardware, who knows really. I might put in a decent Socket A setup for the time being. I might finally upgrade, who knows. I have a Gigabyte mobo / JIUHB DUT3C 1800 I scored today for free so I may make a hella old school OC'er with it.

It goes under the cutting wheel tomorrow

Well I've started the initial cut, is it just me or have Dremel wheels taken a nosedive in longetivity?

I did the entire Choppers mod 1.0 on 9 HD cut off wheels, I just killed one re-inforced cut off wheel on ONE line of the maltese....maybe it's the metal composition of this case.

I'll probably kill a whole 20 pack of the HD's on the curved parts of the maltese.

Oh and some pics of the modding, 8 second exposure and tripod FTW.





I'll have the cut finished by tonight.

BTW mods please change the name of the thread to J-Dogg's Choppers Mod 2.0

How about a Schwinn mod?

Could turn out cool...

Welp 10 cutoff wheels and umpteen amounts of cut-off wheel dust, the initial cut is finished.....sanding and grinding all the sharp edges is all that is left.





The window install will be one of the last things I do with this case, the panels are going to be powdercoated and before they are, they will be sandblasted.

There will be Schwinn paraphernalia somewhere on this mod, but a Schwinn mod would be pretty neat, maybe my next project. I have been wanting to revisit the Choppers Mod for the longest time, ever since I screwed up the original. I cut the maltese too large and there was too much bondo, and a cracked window that because of the bondo I couldn't remove, and it was one big mess so I scrapped the original sidepanel.

Looking sweeeeet bro, changed the thread name for you

Keep the pics coming!

It's still showing up as the old title for some reason.

Sidepanel cutting is pretty much done. The next thing to do will be some sort of a blowhole on the top, and looming of the PSU. Drivebays are painted. I'll probably be doing some trimming around the case in some areas.

Well I have run into an issue with my Dremel, it seems the bit is stuck in the chuck and will not come out, if I remove it it takes the whole chuck right off with bit still intact.

I've tried penetrating lube and nothing seems to work. I'm ready to sand down the cuts I made and smooth out the edges on the iron cross.

When I get paid next week I'm going to buy a couple hole saws and begin fan modding. I wanted to put a 120mm fan somewhere and I think it will be on the top and bottom (hot air rises cool air sinks)

Not sure what color I'm going to powdercoat the inside but it might end up being some kind of red metal flake or sparkly red to accent the red lighting theme.

I've found sometimes it's a matter of gripping the chuck in one set of pliers and the shaft in another, and giving it a twist to break the binding.

I use one of those $15.99 Dremelalikes, so it tends to bind virtually every single time. I had a real dremel, but first its speed control went haywire (only 150% of top speed available much of the time) and then finally it stopped turning on. Strangely, the $16 product was more robust in that respect.

I want that case stock.... so deep...

Thread name should be right now

That idea for removing the bit from the chuck worked, now I have a functional Dremel once again. I got to sanding the cuts off and the cut looks excellent, this is probably some of my best work to date. While sanding I got some really neat ideas for some finishing touches after powdercoating.

I also have some other neat ideas spawned from the first Choppers mod and a few things from the original Short Circuit mod I did in 2003, which I still have to this day and it houses my current gaming rig. One thing I have noticed about some modded cases is durability, some people throw out their modded cases or retire them from service when finished, both my Short Circuit mod and my Gateway mod are still in front line service and this new mod will probably house my Unreal Tournament server.

This weekend I'm probably going to focus on modding of the case itself, drive bays, fans, etc. The fan mods are going to be tricky because of the removable top, the side panels fit from the top down and to access them you have to remove the top of the case, which slides backward.

Here is the finished cut, I'm very pleased with how this turned out.



BTW this is my official entry into the PCA and A4T case mod competition. I'll update the pics tonight with logos. This mod should turn out to be some of my best work ever because I will have a lot of experience behind this mod in cutting and wiring things together in the last 3+ years, and on top of that my paint hookup that I have. So now I finally have a mod that I know what I'm doing with.

This is my official entry into the PCA and A4H case modding competition.

Merged them for ya, j-dogg... Good luck with the contest

Still working on this, just very poor right now lol cant afford materials atm.

Welp I'm about to put the window in, but I am not sure what color to paint the inside. The lighting is red CCFL's, with red LED fans, I had actually considered red or black inside.

I would go red....

Well I decided to mock everything up and install the CCFL's, everything looks nice and I will probably do the inside in red the only thing is I need to find something to light up the right part of the maltese there's a stack of HDD racks in the way covering most of the right side and they need to be illuminated somehow, may use EL wire.

I found this really neat black ribbon IDE cable made by HP that's folded in half and covered with a black mesh covering and they are super-easy to conceal. Pulled them from a server in the boneyard and they look REAL nice in this rig, helps keep everything clean as a whistle. I'll have to go back and get more of these things for the other HDD's.

I'll have some pics tomorrow, but so far everything is going according to plan. This week I hope to have the 120mm exhaust fan blowholes cut.

Here's the mock up.







Overall pretty clean, just going to use a different PSU that is easier to hide and with longer wires for the lower drives. You can see some of that IDE cable I was talking about, I scored 3 more of them from the bone yard. They are a cinch to conceal.

The only issue I am seeing here is lighting up the right part of the iron cross. The drivebays kind of inhibit the light from the second ccfl from making it over there. I had considered a 3rd CCFL hidden somewhere in the right side of the case but I am not sure of exactly where. I might actually have to take one apart, remove the plastic tube and mounts to make it fit.

Specs:

Abit VP6
Dual P3 1ghz
1gb pc133
Radeon 7200 ddr
30gb + 40gb + DVD-R+ for now.

If I upgrade and build my next gaming rig which is looking like that might happen this will most likely house it.