Whew. Huge update today.

Made a trip to the hardware and picked up the last odds and ends that I needed. Most importantly: a 3/4" hole saw. First things first, mounted the power buttons.




As I said earlier, the power buttons on the original UFO front are not centered. So, in order for my buttons to fit on the new front panel, I needed to also drill out the original front panel. Tearing up a multi-hundred dollar case is fun!




But that wasn't that last of it. When the 5.25 bay bracket was installed, it covered up half of the holes, so the buttons didn't fit.



Nothing that can't be fixed.



Not the cleanest job in the world, but nobody will ever see it behind the new panel.




Here's the old UFO panel I used to test all of my bits/taps/techniques on.




Time to finish the front panel. This is one of the coolest parts of the project as far as I'm concerned: a slim slot-loading DVD drive tucked between my front panel and the original case. Here it is mounted to my front panel, I used double-sided foam adhesive to secure it, much like the foam pad you get with DDC's.



Now, onto the good stuff. Flushed the rads a final few times, and mounted them in the case. Also mounted the res, and ran a couple tubes. Loop order is going to be Res -> Pump -> Vid Card -> CPU -> PA120.3 -> MCR220 -> Res.





And then, after all of this momentum, disaster struck.



One of the screws on the bottom of my FuZion was stripped. Try as I might, I couldn't turn it. There was no way I was going to wait another 2-3 days for a new CPU block, let alone send this one back for a replacement. After many attempts, fate tipped in my favor and the screw budged. With a little ingenuity and a lot of brute force, I managed to get it out. Put my quad nozzle in, and closed that sucker back up with a new screw.

Tomorrow: finish the loop and leak test.