May-8-2007
I spent some time to manufacture some acrylic spacers for the casters that came with the Lian Li case. They were originally riveted into the case and needed to be drilled out so that I could paint the case properly. While doing the painting and waiting for that to dry good and well, I decided to make some LED case feet. The feet are made out of 1/4" acrylic scrap that I had left over. I cut it down with via the score and snap method, did some additional grinding with the dremel tool and then some finish sanding. The four holes were drilled with a normal drill bit, it is better of you use drill bits for plastic, or grind the sharp edged off of a drill bit, or dull them in some method so that they drill by scraping. If they are sharp they will snag in the relatively soft acrylic and cause cracking, splitting or chipping.
Here are some photos of the LED feet, click on the photo's if you'd like to see the full size versions, in fact, if you hadn't notice already, you can do that on most pictures on these pages or scroll through your browser cache later, these are not thumbnailed images, they are simply resized for the pages.
The LEDs are mounted into holes which are drilled approximately two-thirds of the way through the acrylic. The tops of the feet were polished so that the metal would reflect much of the light back up into the acrylic itself. The LEDs were sanded to shorten their plastic cases, and then glued into their holes. I made a metal template of one foot, and used that to drill the accompanying hole in the 343B for the wires to feed up through.
As you can see above the feet are finally mounted and produce a nice, soft, amber glow around the case itself. This is what I Was looking for, I didn't really want a super bright glow underneath or anything along those lines, sometimes subtlety is much better than garish blinding lights.
While I was playing with lights I decided to mount some red and green Luxeon Star LEDs into the case as well. They fit almost perfectly into the top case/brace support rails of the Lian Li 343B, with a little bit of thermal adhesive like Arctic Silver 2 part thermal epoxy on the edges, with some AS5 or Ceramique thermal grease right under the lamps. The Luxeons should be a great fit. I will be going with all red or a mix of Red and Orange Luxeons for this mod, the green was used as ballast until I can order more Luxeons.
That's all for this page and the updates through May 8th, I have quite a few more to go, I've just been getting behind, the next few sections will be a progress update for the manufacture of the Reservior from scratch, so be sure to check back often. The next update should be in about 9-10 hours and include a lot of neat stuff. I am going to keep updating these pages today (May 1) until I am caught up with the photo's I have taken, another 7 days worth.
-- End Part 4