Leaderboard

Ooft, what a week. So picking up where I left off, plan for this past week was to get all of the acrylic pieces hashed out. I wanted to get that out of the way, since it was going to be one of the more tricky items on the agenda. Sure enough, it was fairly tricky. Attempt #1 The holes for attempt #1 were slightly off, but nothing a little moulding/edging wouldn't be able to hide; same with the cutout for the pump and drain port. Unfortunately I had a bit of an accident when I was drilling the last hole, my step bit had got stuck and I accidentally applied to much pressure when trying to get it unstuck. Which resulted in a crack: Whilst only apparent when you get up close and personal, I knew I would have to try again. Attempt #2 I decided to take a short break from redoing that particular panel and started working on the rear and bottom. Ended up reusing the broken panel for the rear bit and did a test fit with the edging, fairly happy with it. Bottom still needs a fair bit of tweaking, but I was ready to dive back in to getting the big piece sorted. Got everything cut and drilled, was looking better than the first attempt. If you look closely however, you will likely notice a large crack above the fittings. That crack happened whilst I was dusting off the acrylic, couldn't believe it; another significant amount of time down the drain. On the plus side, it gave me some food for thought and I decided that I would make some tweaks for... Attempt #3 I now had a really good template for what I needed to do, and can report that everything went perfectly! Holes are spot on, edges straight and most importantly NO #### CRACKS. In retrospect, the cracks were of course my fault; but valuable lessons were learned. Next up was the acrylic pieces for the top and front fan areas: The top didn't cause me any real issues, just some minor tweaking was required to get it to fit snugly. Not convinced I'm 100% happy with it, so may have to revisit later. The front part though, that was interesting. I figured that a 200mm hole saw cutter would do the trick: What an absolute beast of a unit, considerably heavy as well! It definitely does the job, you just have to take it nice and slowly; ensuring not to force it too much. The problem however was that whilst the scrap piece of acrylic (the circle or 'donut hole' if you will) was 200mm in diameter, the piece I was using ended up being larger. Which is of course due to the width of the saw bit itself. This meant that once I trimmed the piece to fit in the front section, I was left with 3 separate pieces (very slight tolerances on the sides) that didn't actually line up well with the fans themselves. So I ended up having to cut the pieces up even more (into 6 pieces) and try to fit them together like some kind of jigsaw puzzle: In its current state, it clearly looks like crap. The curvature of the circles is off, edges don't line up, etc... I've got a few plans up my sleeve to achieve the end result that I want, just a case of some more experimentation. It has made me reconsider trying to achieve the raw acrylic finish on the front and top though, as I think it will look much cleaner if the panels are paint-matched to the rest of the case; with the seams all removed so it looks like 1 piece of plastic. So whilst it was a frustrating week for me (1 day of work, 2 days of sciatic pain afterwards, rinse/repeat), it has also been a great learning experience for me. I'm going to take the weekend off so I can relax and recuperate, but full steam ahead next week; time for some dremel work and get started on paint! Thanks for stopping by folks, take care and stay safe!

Hi, Could you sent your request for us by email , please! Thank you irischen@thermaltake .com

I have one of these cases. They look nice, and are quite light. I got one with a 650 W power supply pre-installed, which along with the pre-installed fans makes for a good deal. A couple of things you should know before buying one: - the FAN controller board for the front panel fans does not do PWM speed control. The fans just run at top speed. The connection to the Motherboard just allows control of the RGB, not the speed. I'm thinking of replacing the fans and controller board with one that has PWM connection to the motherboard. - the blue power light is VERY bright. I put some electrical tape over it, and it is still quite bright. - the manual is terrible. It lacks information about the fan controller board (e.g. it says nothing about hooking up the power to it, has no listing of compatible fans, has no description of how to remove the front panel if you want to replace the front fans). The diagram showing the hard drive mounting is cryptic, a simple illustration of how a drive is fastened to the plates would be helpful.