Project "Big Budget Boomer Box"

[cpachris]

haahhaah, your project is so nice!

Got you ideas about the radiators and for sure - you will not face problems on cooling capacity with those 7 big-sized rads

Thanks Leo! Much appreciated.

[cpachris]

My FrozenCPU package with fans and another radiator came today. Here are some pictures....enjoy!

[cpachris]

Sorry its been so long since last post, but I've been busy customizing my fans. Let me take you through all my steps:

First put something interesting on TV, and get all your fan boxes close to you. I chose HBO's "Girls" because it was playing about 10 episodes back-to-back. Thought it would give me a chance to see if I like the series. I don't . But that's another story. Take your box and open it up.



First thing you want to do is test the fan to make sure it works. I used my "ghetto PSU" made out of my 9-volt battery to plug them in and test. Quick and easy.




Happy to say that all 42 of my M12-S2's were in working order. Now.....lets start tearing them down. There are a few goodies in the box that you will want to start piles of. First, I took out the rubber gaskets that come with the fan. You won't want to use these until you are ready to install on a rad. Put them in a pile for now:






Do the same with the useless screws that come with the fan. If you are putting these on a rad, you won't need these at all:




There is also a case badge in every box. So......if someone was dying for a Noiseblocker case badge....I could probably make you a good deal on one. or 42 or them.




Ok. Done with the fluff. Now for the real work. You see that little black plastic clip that I'm pointing to? Take that off and start a pile of them.




Now lets remove the blades from the frame. With these Noiseblockers, there are no clips or anything that you have to remove first. Just get your fingers wrapped around the frame, and put both thumbs on the blade hub and push. It will pop right off. This picture only shows one hand on the fan.....but its because the other hand is holding a camera.




Now lets take the sticker off the fan blades. Get your exacto knife and gently peel one of the edges up. If you catch it clean, the whole sticker will lift off with almost no residue left. Just go slowly. Oh....and if you don't catch one clean and it leaves a lot of residue.......DON'T try and clean it!!!!!!! I've tried everything from alochol to acetone to soap, and all it does is get worse when you start burring it around. You need to either live with it, or scrape with your exacto knife.




Now......we need to get that sticker off the frame. I wasn't as careful with this one since I knew I would be covering this spot with my own custom vinyl stickers.




There is a second sticker underneath the first, and it holds a small magnet n place. Leave this one alone.




That's my 12 max pictures....so continued in the next post.......

[cpachris]

Continuing the fan deassembly process......


Now some of you may not need this next step, but I do. I like to use some Liquid Tape on the wire connections for the fan.



Nothing but a little drop of solder is holding these wires into place. And when I sleeve, I sometimes pull harder than I should. So, this just gives me a little extra insurance that the wire doesn't pop off the fan.




I do it on the front as well as the back:




Lastly, you will want to remove the rubber corners from the fans. One of the four corners is different than the other three because its shaped for a little cut-out to help facilitate wire management. I keep these in a separate pile from the others, because it is a royal pain to have to check each corner out and look for these when you put them back on.






Now take a big sip of your glass of cabernet.....




Now.....rinse and repeat 42 times, and you'll have something like this:





I'm gonna be fallin' asleep in church tomorrow, but I'm done with this disassembly work. Tomorrow I will finish the paint prep (tape off the sensitive stuff) and start painting. More tomorrow!

[LeoAndrade]

jeez, lot of work you did with those fans

[cpachris]

Next....get your painter's tape and put one strip down making sure it covers the outside edges of the hub.




Unless you have some pretty wide tape, it probably won't cover the entire hub. Seal it down good around the edges with your fingernail.




Put on a second piece of tape to cover the remaining edges, and seal tightly with your fingernail.




Now take your exacto knife, and carefully cut around the OUTSIDE edges of the fan hub. You do NOT want to get paint on the inside of this hub. So stick to the outside of the hub.




Peel off excess tape you just cut and examine to make sure you have it sealed up good.




Rinse and repeat 42 times, and this is what you have.




For the frames, the important part is to protect the hole that the fan blade spindle slides into. You don't want paint down there. You'll notice I didn't bother to protect any of the wires or sleeving, since I will be redoing all of this anway. Rinse and repeat 42 times, and this is what you have.

[cpachris]

Now that the fans are all disassembled and ready for painting....lets get started.

I made a quick little homemade paint booth out of a box for a TV I bought recently. I stuck some PVC pipe through the sides, and it made a nice little rack to hang the frames from. As mentioned previously, I just used the sleeved wire to hang them with, since I'll be redoing all of this anyway.





When painting you want to do just light dusting of paint to make a very thin layer of paint, let it dry about 30 minutes or so, and then do it again. Here is what they looked like after the first coat:



After two coats:



After three coats:



After five coats:



After six coats:



At this point they were looking pretty good. After each coat, I would also rotate the poles in the paintbooth so that the other side was facing forward, to help ensure I was getting all sides evenly. I think its also important to remember that you do not want to try and treat spots. That almost never comes out good. Do lots of thin coats over the entire fan. Do not get up close and try to pinpoint a certain area. You will overpaint it and it will run. I did one final coat for a total of 7, but it was dark so I don't have a final picture of it out in the paintbooth. Next up....the fan blades.

[cpachris]

Here was my setup for the fan blades:





For the blades, I wasn't 100% happy with the last paint testing I had done, with regards to how well it matched the computer case I have. It was darn good, but not perfect. But if you are limited to just the "plastic" paints, there is not as big of a color selection as you get with all the other normal spray paints. So.....what I ended up doing is using a plastic primer from Valspar first. I put two light coats of it on both sides of the fans. Its clear...but creates a surface that will allow regular paint to bond to the plastic. That opened up some more colors for me. What I ended up being the happiest with in my pre-testing, was to create a base coat using Rust-O-Leum "cabernet", and then topcoating it with Rust-O-Leum "crimson red". The cabernet by itself had too much purple in it, and the crimson red by itself didn't have enough purple in it. The two together are perfection for what I'm trying to do. I ended up doing 3 light coats of the cabernet, and then 2 light coats of the crimson red.

So this is what the blades looked like after the first coat of cabernet:




After two coats of the cabernet:



Lost my sunlight so I don't have pictures of what these looked like after each of the remaining coats, but I am absolutely thrilled with how they came out. They are perfect color for me. Here is a shot of everything after I brought it back inside for the night:


So at this point I have all of the fan blades done, and 1/2 of the frames. Tomorow I plan on finishing the frames, and then doing all of the tape removal. Then I'll start on fan headers and sleeving. I'm planning on shortening all of the fan headers to 3 or 4 inches, and sleeving them in white MDPC-X. Then I'm going to make a custom fan harness with male connectors to minimize the wiring. I'll have more tomorrow!

[cpachris]

I've started another assembly line for a few more tasks on the fan frames that were painted yesterday. Here is what I'm doing to each of them:

First I'm taking each fan frame, and inspecting closely for any missed spots or thin spots. For those that need a touch-up, they will go back out in the paintbooth:




For the frames that were in good shape, I go ahead and remove the protective painters tape:




Then I'm measuring 3 inches of wire from the frame, and cutting it:




I want all of my fans to have short headers on them, and then I will make a custom harness for them and run a multi-tailed power line where I need it to go.




Next, I'm taking an exacto knife and splitting the heatshrink that was holding the old sleeve on:








Next, I'm getting rid of the tab that holds the wires next to the frame. See that notch on the top right side of the frame?




I"m planning on having sleeve come down the side of the frame, and this notched opening is not big enough for the sleeved wires. I'm simply getting rid of it all together, and will most likely use a drop of super glue to keep the sleeve next to the frame.




And finally, I'm putting back on 3 of the rubber corners. I don't want the 4th rubber corner on until I'm done with the wiring and sleeving.




Now....rinse and repeat....42 times. More to come later!

[cpachris]

I tried, but just couldn't seem to take a picture WHILE holding the stripper or crimper. So I have no action shots of these steps....but I'll show you one of the finished products, and describe the steps I'm doing to each one to get there. I'm working assembly line style again. I like to take a small number of tasks and work my way down the line of fans, doing just those tasks for each one. Here is what I'm doing tonight to each fan:

1. Strip about 3mm of insulation of the end of each of the 3 fan wires
2. Crimp a new pin onto the end of each wire
3. Using white electrical tape to wrap the wires together. This will ensure that NO color shows through the white sleeve that will go on.
4. Put in the 4th corner rubber piece. Decided I really did need it in there before I get the sleeve on.

Here is a picture of what one of the fans looks like after these four steps:




After I had been through the above steps for each of the 42 fans, I got my tripod out so I could set the timer and take a few pictures of these next steps. Not all completely in focus, but it lets me get both hands in the picture.

I'm starting with the crimped, taped, fan frame from the previous assembly line:





First I inspect where the wires run up into the motor, and use an exacto knife to clear any extra liquid tape away so that I can be sure and push the sleeve all the way down to the base:




Then I snip off 4.75 inches of sleeve. I don't need to measure each fan wire, since I cut them all the same length in previous assembly line. I'm going with white MDPC-X for the fans. I'll use some color on some of the other wiring.




Then I warm up the ends and taper the sleeve so it doesn't spread to big on me. Need it slim to fit down tight against the base.




Then I slide/inch the sleeve onto the wires. Sometimes you have to be careful when sliding it over the pins, to make sure you don't catch the sleeve and pull it.




Then I'm sliding a piece of the precut MDPC heatshrink all the way down to the base. I'm trying to make sure that once the stickers are on the fan, that there will be no wires still exposed.




Next I grab my heat gun and shink that thing up. NO MAKING FUN OF MY PURPLE HEAT GUN! I got this thing for $3 during a Hobby Lobby clearance sale. I think they usually sell it as a scrapbooking tool. But hey....it does the job. And by the way, I would highly recommend using a heatgun instead of a lighter when you are working with white heatshrink. It is so easy to char the heatshrink and discolor it. I use a lighter only on the sleeve ends to help taper them, since I know these will be covered with heatshrink. I would always use a heat gun with white heatshrink.





Next I put the connector on the fan pins. I'm going with white, instead of the black that came with the fans. Matches the heatshrink real well.




Next I cut a piece of the SATA shrink, and then slide it over the fan connector:




Now grab your super masculine heat gun and shrink that bad boy up!




That's it for this assembly line, so rinse and repeat 42 times. Here is what it looks like at this point:




After I get done with these steps, I need to superglue the sleeve to the frame (I'm not going to use the black clips that came with the frame), put on a custom vinyl sticker, and put back on the fan blades. Then I'll be done! More later.....

[cpachris]

Before I can show you the last steps of putting the fans together, it would make sense for me to show you how I do the custom vinyl stickers. It's pretty easy to do, doesn't cost much, and really gives a build a professional custom look.

First, you need to use an artwork application to design what you want your sticker to look like. I use Adobe Illustrator. You could really use any program, but the reason I like AI is that it generates vector based graphics instead of raster based graphics (pixels). If you don't know the difference, Google it. In a nutshell, every line in vector art is defined by a mathematical equation that determines its relationship to other lines. What this allows is infinite scaling with no loss of quality. If your artwork is pixel based, it can start looking very poor when you make it larger or smaller.



When I'm replacing a sticker with one of my own, I typically like to use a copy of the Company's logo, but then use my own color scheme and other items. In AI, I setup one artboard where I just paste in copies of the logo I want to use. It will always be raster based if I've grabbed it from a website, so I use the "Live Trace" option in AI to create a vector based graphic from it. If the original jpeg was large and clean, the trace function returns great results. If it was small.....sometimes you have some clean-up to do. After I have accumulated any of the vector art I want to use, I start an artboard where I arrange the pieces like I want them, and then a 3rd artboard where I scale the item to the right size and then copy it as many times as it will fit:




Once this page is created, I will typically print it on plain paper, to test and make sure it is the size I want. Once happy with sizing, I get a sheet of printable vinyl and print the page on this. I typically use Papilio papers, and they have numerous ones to choose from, and you can find it fairly inexpensively online from their webshop or on Amazon. Its something like $10 to $15 a package for 10 sheets. This is the one I used for this project:




The printed page is thick and feels very sturdy. It feel like vinyl.....because it is. You need to set your printer settings to the thickest paper profile it has to make sure it can make it through (one of the photopaper settings should work).




Then you want to put a laminate over the top of it, to really give it that finished professional look. Any will do....I used this for my sticker project:




Lay it down slowly, trying to smooth it one from one side to the other and not get any air bubbles. If you look closely in this picture, you can see an air bubble that will probably eliminate two of these from being able to be used. If you get a lot of air bubbles....don't despair. Sometimes they come out easier once you have cut your stickers, because you don't have as far to move the bubble to an edge.




Now you are ready to cut out your stickers from the page. If you are doing circle stickers, like I am for this project.....DO NOT USE SCISSORS! Nothing would look worse than to see those ragged, non-perfect edges you are going to get from trying to cut a circle with a pair of scissors. You will ruin them, or be real embarrassed when you put them on your rig. Instead....you want a circle cutter. There are lots available online. I have several from "PaperShaper", and these are typically sold for scrapbooking and arts and crafts. The right size for the Noiseblocker fans is 1.5 inches, but you will find them in 1/8 inch increments for anything under 2 inches.





Now just carefully line up the circle cutter over your sticker and click. Ta-da!




Notice how I created the printed stickers with a larger border than I was going to cut? That is to make sure I don't have any white around the edges of the sticker when its cut.




Now admire your pile of stickers. They have a peel-off adhesive back and will stick to any component you want.




Now relax and enjoy some cabernet!




Next up, we will finish up the fans and do some pics. Stay tuned!

[Utnorris]

Nice build!

[SoMBrA]

Very nice work on those fans.

Thank for showing the sticker process!

[Pinwmpires]

A simple job to do.. but when you have to do this simple job SOOOO many times.. it is just exhausting! Good job you ve done there Keep it up!

[weston]

Great Project!

Side note - Hexane or Rubbing alcohol would take off the residue easily. Acetone etches plastic which gave you the dull marred look I'm assuming you saw.

[cpachris]

Nice build!

Thanks Utnorris!

Very nice work on those fans.

Thank for showing the sticker process!

You bet! Appreciate the kind words SoMBrA!

A simple job to do.. but when you have to do this simple job SOOOO many times.. it is just exhausting! Good job you ve done there Keep it up!

It would be tough to do if you didn't love doing it. That's for sure. Thanks pinwmpires!

Great Project!

Side note - Hexane or Rubbing alcohol would take off the residue easily. Acetone etches plastic which gave you the dull marred look I'm assuming you saw.

Dang....I actually had some rubbing alcohol. Didn't think to try that. I'll give that a go next time and report back. Appreciate the advice weston!

[cpachris]

Two more mini assembly lines were what it took to finish up the fans. Here is what I did in each of them.

If you remember, the fans came with a little black plastic clip which kept the (non-sleeved) wiring in place on the frame. Well, after the electrical tape, and sleeving...I just can't make it fit flat enough inside the fan frame groove for this clip to go back on. But there needs to be something keeping the sleeved wire next to the frame. Thought about several options, but decided on super glue. That should hold it good, and also look the cleanest because it won't show anywhere. These are more self shot timer tripod shots, so the auto focus didn't always catch the right spot, but you'll get the idea. This is me putting down a thin strip of super glue inside the fan frame groove:



Then I would press the sleeve down into the fan frame groove and hold it nice and tight for about 60 seconds. I kept some tunes playing in the background to help pass the time.



Rinse and repeat 42 times.



Next assembly line was the last one. It's time to put the blades back on the fan, stickers on the frame, and test these puppies.

These Noiseblocker Multiframe fans comes with a little grease on the fan blade spindle, that you can see when you take them apart. After being disassembled for so long, and going through the taping, painting, etc.....I want to lube them back up before putting them back together. This is what I'm using for these fans. White lithium grease:



I cut the tip of the tube so that its big enough for the fan blade spindle to slide right in:



If I squeeze the tube a little bit while the spindle is inside the tube, it puts a nice little layer of grease on the spindle:



Then just press/click the fan blade back onto the frame. No clips or rings to mess with.



Then I plugged the fan back into my "Ghetto PSU" I made previously out of the 9-volt battery to test it. And by the way....I can't tell you how handy this little battery PSU has been to test fans. My guess is it would even power up a pump for loop fills. I may play with a cleaner design and make a few for sale. Very handy. Anyway, the fans needed to be tested, because after all, I had cut off all the original connectors, recrimped pins and put on new connectors. It would be fairly easy to make a bad crimp or put the wires back in the wrong connector spot. But I'm happy to report that all 42 fans spun back up and were as quiet as ever.



Flip the frame over and slap on one of the custom vinyl stickers we previously made:



Sit back and admire your work:



Rinse and repeat 42 times.

That does it for the 120mm fans. In most of my posts, you'll see I'm doing one or more "assembly lines" with tasks. It definitely doesn't have to be done that way. Some people might choose to start with one fan and walk it all the way through the process from beginning to end, before moving on to the next fan. For me,...I found this approach easier for the volume of fans I was doing. I mean, with this many fans, even a fairly simple task that is about 3 minutes....will take 2 hours to finish for all 42 fans. And the more tasks you try and squeeze into your assembly line process, the more you are switching tools....etc. I like small bite-sized processes that I can quickly run down for all of them. But I may have done it differently if I was only doing a handful of fans. Just food for thought.

I still have to customize the four 140mm fans, and the 4 cute little baby fans. Look for some posts on that in the upcoming week.

Here are some finished pictures from up in my "faux studio"

[SoMBrA]

They look very nice, congrats

[Edited]

I like it

[Saltire]

Sexy !

[cpachris]

I like it

Sexy !

They look very nice, congrats

Thank you all! More pics coming below.

[cpachris]

Here are just a few teaser shots of all 42 of the 120mm fans!



I've got many more pictures of all 42 fans together in this post!

[rehpyc]

You, my good sir, have quite the patience!

[LeoAndrade]

Man, amazing job. Congratulations. Can't wait to see them installed on the system.

[Raiden]

With so many fans that will definetely fly away, you better hold it to the ground

Sweet