Weighted Companion Cube case

Someone had to do it. Note that I'm notorious for not completing projects, but hopefully this is one of those rare exceptions.

The goal is to have a ~15" companion cube for my aging hardware. I'm tired of staring at the carcass of a case I use, and I hunger for companionship.


Day (night, actually) 1:

MDF acquired


With all the gold plated, diamond encrusted laptops out there, I felt my case deserved exotic materials as well. For this, I turned to the synthetic sheet good known as MDF. Developed in a laboratory by overpaid scienticians, this is the only material that meets my extreme requirements. That's a 4x8 sheet rough cut into thirds, that is.

Next update should hit the streets on Saturday (unless I lose interest by then, which would be a shame considering the $17 I've invested in exotic sheet goods so far).

xoxo,
-mike

Hope you finish it. You should put a piece of cake on one side instead of the heart just for fun.

"I even invited your best friend companion cube, but he couldn't make it because you murdered him"

Oh PLEASE finish this It will be a triumph, a huge success even!

http://digg.com/mods/The_Ultimate_Co...rk_In_Progress

What can i say, i miss companion cube

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=430

bigger version

i am so subscribing right now

subscribed!

early subb!

@ 0mega: "Ultimate" companion cube mod? You're really busting my balls here; I was aiming for average, not ultimate

So I started today off by cutting out the interior portion (the part that looks like a simple cube). I'm not doing any fancy joinery, just butt joints and a couple rabbets for the front and rear (which will also help me keep the cube square).


I applied a heavy amount of glue since the edges of MDF are so porous, busted out the corner clamps and besseys, and got everything situated.


Finished the glue up and grabbed a few more clamps.


While waiting for the glue to dry, I drilled and screwed each corner on the front and back.


After driving in the screws I removed the clamps and scraped the excess glue. There's still a bunch of glue, but this cube has much sanding in its future.


Made a simple jig to cut out the grids... I'm only doing this on the front, top and sides as I'm not silly enough to worry about the bottom, and the rear will be used for ventilation and the motherboard tray.


Here it is with the grids cut out. I used a 1/4" spiral downcut bit and I think it's a little wide for the scale, but it's more than good enough for me.


Here's the setup I used at the table saw to cut multiple thin strips at a consistent size. I used the back of the featherboard as a reference, and just moved the fence in after each strip was cut. The result was several 1/4" wide pieces of 1/8" thick hot pink transparent acrylic.


A preview of what I have in mind. I need to roundover the edges in the grid and I plan on lighting the acrylic, whether or not it's totally authentic.


That's all for today, my feet hurt!

for some reason i want 1. hurry up and finish it please

Nice idea!
Subscribed

sweet. Can't wait to see how this turns out.

will you drop in lava/fire when done?

lol @ ^^^ PLEASE don't kill the weighted companion cube when you're finished, you need to eat cake with it when it's all over.

I loved portal, but I didn't think of doing this. Good job, very excited to see the finished product.

/subscribed

Lol great idea

I still haven't finished making the cardboard cutout companion cube

wow it didn't take long for someone to start one of these lol

Oh, what are your ideas for the fans since you are using it as a case. And will you mount more than one system in it? (One on each of the side walls?)

I want to have your children Mike.

Thats awesome, I hope you finish it mike.

I plan to keep her out of the incinerator, especially since MDF is full of dangerous chemical compounds like formaldehyde. The cake idea, however, sounds like a much better way to celebrate mod completion.

@jmackay: She's a small case... the cube shape that exists currently is only 14". I ordered a motherboard tray that will hopefully allow one complete system fit like a glove. I tried to make it as small as possible while support a full sized ATX mobo. If you went with some compact coolers, you could probably squeeze 2 in there, but not much else.

For ventilation, the bottom of the case will have a nice big port-hole (portal?) and the rear of the case will have as many 120mm fans as I can fit (2 minimum, 4 ideally). I like to go with big fans at low RPM. I'll arrange components to allow for airflow over the drives/psu and back across the motherboard (sort of like an S configuration if you look at it from the side).

@Arcygenical:


Thanks for the feedback, folks. Update coming...

Didn't get anything super satisfying done today, just boring planning and prep work.

Ripped some 1/2" MDF into 5.75" wide pieces and laminated them together so I could have some 1" thick stock for all the corner pieces:


I also cut and routed up a set of master templates to base all the corner pieces off of. I'll need to have 24 of the ones on the left total, and 16 of the pieces on the right. The radius was routed by jigging up a trammel out of scrap MDF.


This is roughly how the corner pieces will be put together. It's missing the major 45* chamfer on the ends, but I didn't want to waste time trying to figure out how to do that in sketchup (for the round part) when I'll just burn through it with a huge router bit later, anyway.


That's all for this weekend. Next real update will come towards the end of week/next weekend. Thanks for reading.