Warframe - Corpus Locker PC Case

[Saer]

Edit: It's all done!
(There's more photos on the second page)

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I've been playing lots of Warframe for years now, and only now actually decided to make a prop replica from the game. I don't exactly remember why I ended up with a very mild obsession with the Corpus lockers specifically, but after staring at them long enough I realized that they kinda looked like a pc case (my spouse has lots of giant Gateway 2000 pc cases so I guess my perception of what a pc case looks like is a bit skewed nowadays haha) and I do enjoy building a functional prop that's not just purely decorational, so this idea was born. This is also going to have to be as much of a budget build as I can manage.

Obviously started off with collecting some reference images from in-game, including of the... peculiar way these locker doors open.

Then I had to decide on the size of this thing. While I did joke about just building it full-size, there's not enough space in the house for it and it would also be a lot harder to transport (and way more expensive), so I went with the scale of "as small as I could possibly make it" given that I had to be able to fit all the pc components into it. So I measure out the parts I already had on hand, which were the motherboard and GPU at that time (it still counts as a budget build if you traded for the pc parts with a friend, right) and made a rough mockup of them in Fusion 360. There's a 3D model of this version of the Corpus locker over on thingiverse which I downloaded to get an idea of the scale, and what the smallest I can make this would be while still being able to fit the motherboard and GPU inside. The GPU is actually wider than the motherboard, so to save on some more size I decided to turn the motherboard by 90 degrees instead of the traditional way of mounting it. Also did a quick stop in blender to separate the 3D model into its different parts. Green is the motherboard mockup, orange the GPU.

I did initially consider making the case itself out of acrylic for a brief moment, then realized I'm not made out of money and at least somewhat value my sanity, and instead settled on good ol MDF sheets, with the base structure made with extruded aluminum for its versatility. Obviously didn't look into different extruded aluminum sizes enough and just kinda arbitrarily settled on 2525mm ones since I found one site that let you order them cut to size in the sizes I needed with the downside that that did end up being kinda expensive, and there's not a lot of connectors for 2525 aluminum apparently. Also the 2525 asset that I imported into Fusion had a slightly different crosscut design, but it still ended up working out tbh. I personally also just prefer working in mm over inches, so there's that too.

With the initial base aluminum structure figured out, I then got to the long and seemingly neverending task of re-modeling the whole thing out of 3mm flat sheets in Fusion and adding all the small details that aren't present in the thingiverse model. Separating the original 3D model into sections for this helped tremendously. I also did my best to color-code things to an extent, ie all the red parts will have to be 3D printed. I built the whole thing kinda like those lasercut wooden 3D puzzles, with interlocking spacers instead of using screws or nails. It did turn into a bit of a giant puzzle in the end tbh. I also only really bothered with modeling one side for the main body, since it is symmetrical. It was also at this point that I realized that the thingiverse 3D model was mirrored, since the doors were the other way round in-game, but I'm already asking a lot from Fusion at this point and didn't wanna risk crashing the whole thing when trying to mirror a lot of parts, so I just had to remind myself of this fact and to make sure to remember to flip the doors when I actually assemble things. There's still a couple mistakes I made with missed booleans for the slots to put things together, and I forgot to add the little circle details on the bottom corner of the sidepanels, but thankfully those were all fixable things. The local makerspace has a lasercutter that's thankfully big enough, so that was my plan for actually cutting all of this out of the MDF sheets.

Before I started on any of the MDF or even bought any I wanted to assemble the base aluminum frame first though, because if that doesn't work out there's no point in continuing. I did order some of those slide in angle connectors for extruded aluminum, but I got the wrong size first, so I had to reorder them again. I only wanted to use those were necessary though since I didn't quite trust them to hold the weight of the motherboard and GPU without sliding. I did have to use them for the base square though, since the aluminum is spaced a bit weirdly there due to the chamfered bottom corners of the main body. But for the majority of connections I ended up drilling holes into the aluminum and tapping those to screw things together directly. I also had ordered two extra pieces to potentially put into the sides, which I did end up doing later on. There was a lot of assembly and disassembly and drilling more holes because I kept forgetting some to assemble the base frame, which did end up stripping some of the screws I used, so I ended up having to replace a couple with nicer ones. At that point I also lasercut a baseplate for the motherboard from some spare acrylic at the makerspace to do an initial test fit and make sure things actually, well, fit. At this point I also decided not to add the actual top shelf, since it would be right where the motherboard ends and also interfere with cooling in this ridiculous thing.

Once that was done, I could finally tackle getting the MDF sheets and cutting them. I did find a local woodplace which stocked 4x8' 3mm MDF sheets but didn't know what the price was gonna be beforehand- they ended up being pretty cheap so I kinda got a whole bunch to make sure I'd have enough material and account for tests and mistakes, which was a very good idea haha. Then came the very tedious part of exporting all the faces from Fusion as svgs, which I discovered was not actually a native function? I have such a love-hate relationship with Fusion tbh. There is however an add-on called Shaper Utilities for the Shaper routers to export faces as svgs, so thankfully that ended up working out perfectly. The second, also very tedious part of this, was laying out all the pieces in inkscape which unfortunately does not import files with their names intact... Getting all the pieces imported and named probably took a solid week, and honestly in the end the naming for the major pieces ended up not mattering. Oh well. I also found out that the lasercutter needs some adjusting and doesn't actually cut through properly on the right side of the bed, so I had to re-layout everything to account for that. Some of the big pieces I just had to partially cut out by hand in the end though. Thankfully labeling all the little spaces pieces in the lasercuts worked out really well at least. I've very much had to re-cut some pieces, and I did forget a handful of them at first too, but overall the whole lasercutting process went really well for this. I've worked with lasercutting a bunch in the past so I already tried to take into account from the start that I wouldn't end up with perfectly 90 degree cuts either, and tried not to rely on that during the initial design process. Light spreading as it loses focus throughout the thickness of the material and such.

I'll be documenting the build process some more over the next couple days, I'm still very much actively working on it currently.

 

[Saer]

This was honestly the most fun part of the build tbh. I did tackle this in several larger chunks (the main body, the lid, the big latch and the doors) to help keep things at least somewhat organized, but all there really was to it was assembling and gluing all the MDF pieces together.

For the most part, I managed to not loose too many pieces on my way from the makerspace to home, and I only forgot to actually cut a handful. such as that big cross-support piece on the inside of the lid. Doing dry-fits as I went to make sure everything was actually going to fit onto the aluminum frame in the end. The big side panels had to be cut in two parts since they were too long to fit on the lasercutter, I joined them together on the back with some brown paper strips and wood glue and then reinforced that with some spare MDF strips, which turned out to be quite sturdy.

A little overview on how I designed the pieces to slot together. For all the weird angles I also cut small strips of MDF that attach to the little bracket pieces and just get filled in with woodfiller later on to make them seamless.

The one part that I did somehow grossly mis-measure was the little shelf the power supply will sit on. I'm not quite sure how I managed to mess that one up so much, but oh well. The holes on one side didn't line up at all, while the other side was shifted too far inwards. The little grid pattern I had planned also didn't work out since the connecting points ended up too thin and it just broke out. I also managed to forget to export both sides of this, as it's two layers of MDF sandwiched together, with one having cutouts for the pieces below it which I kinda completely forgot about at that time I guess? The second iteration fit perfectly though. I also took that chance to just recut the bottom pieces it sits on as well, adding a couple small support brackets and punching a big hole in the back part since that's where the power cable and port extensions will go. I'm trying to make the whole thing look as little as a pc case as possible, so all the ports will get routed onto a small panel on the bottom of the back of the locker.

Also for anyone wondering about the weird way the PSU will sit, it's to match the intake fan up to the vent that's on the back of the locker:

 

[Krats]

Nice to see a Warframe related build. Looking forward to seeing this progress.

 

[Saer]

Thanks! Always a bit surprised there's not more props builds for this game tbh.

Some more dry fitting the big panels with the frame spacer pieces, as well as putting in the baseplate for the motherboard. We have a whole bunch of leftover spacers from various vesa mounting kits that worked perfectly for mounting the motherboard baseplate to the aluminum frame to give the motherboard standoffs enough space on the back since those get attached with a nut. It also just looks nicer that way than my previous attempt of just stacking a whole bunch of washers lol. The only goof I did with this was misaligning one of the holes for attaching the baseboard to the frame; it ended up intersecting with where the aluminum frame is bolted together so I just ended up leaving that bolt out. It's still attached really solidly so I don't think it'll be an issue in the long run tbh.

Also started on the seemingly eternal process of woodfiller adding, and did some quick test FDM prints of the parts that would have to be 3D printed to make sure they'll fit. As you can see, the small inset piece in the second image doesn't quite fit into the lid there, trimming off a bit at the bottom solved that though so I revised the 3D model of it accordingly. I also ended up making the model of the bolt a bit longer after doing a test fit since I didn't want it to just slip out with it barely registering in the top or bottom slot. For the small latches on the lid, and the center set in piece I also had to make some small adjustments to the 3D model to better fit the LEDs in them. The small latches specifically had them set a bit too far towards the back to where I was afraid they'd get shorted out or damaged by the bolt that will hold the latch in place in the end, so I gave that a bit more clearance which will hopefully work out fine now.

 

[Bacta]

That’s rad! Nice work! O:

 

[Saer]

Thank you!

I personally dislike running all the extra LEDs off of the motherboard, and I've got a spare ItsyBitsy board from a previous build to run the neopixels that are gonna go in this build, just needed a place to put it. I figured a small enclosure that attaches to one of the aluminum tracks on the inside would do that trick, and I already had designed a basic one for this board in the past. A few corpus looking greebles later and I had a small enclosure to hold the board. Since it's not going to move around the lid just snaps in place and will get one tiny screw just in case. It's basically just the small details from one of the consoles in the game since it has a similar shape, minus the LEDs.

While I was at it, I also decided to make a fancier cover for the PSU to cover up the very non-corpus looking branding and warning stickers haha. I also added some panels to go over the MDF that the PSU sits on, with a slot at the front to route the cables towards the back.

This one's pretty much just the big corpus logo (which actually spells it as Korpus) and this wall panel... thing that sticks out.

Also got around to cutting out some holes and slots that I missed; the big center latch has some small LEDs in it but I forgot that I'll need to leave a hole in the back of it to actually route the cables into the case and somehow also lost one of the small slots in the top back panel to attach it to the frame. That one honestly still kinda baffles me because it's very much there in the svg, the laser just? Decided not to cut it I guess? I do wish I had a better way of hand cutting these MDF panels, the dremel doesn't really work super well on it so I've mostly just been using a drill, some random small saw or an x-acto knife. I feel like my jewelers saw would've been really helpful here but I don't actually know where that is...

 

[Saer]

Some more small progress, not terribly exiting this time but oh well. Soldered up the LEDs for the lid, they're just the small neopixels that already come on circuit boards with resistors and all, and are also a lot easier to hand solder than the loose ones haha. Had these leftover from a previous project that they actually were too big for, but they're perfect for this build. Was also made a lot easier with my spouses nice solder mat and helping hands thingy. At first I though about using the loose neopixels for that center latch, but I realized quickly that just keeping a row of the pcb ones attached to another would probably be a lot easier. This did mean editing the design of the 3D printed part for them a bit to fit though, since the original iteration had them a bit closer together and didn't work for this spacing. I did have to use one less neopixel than I initially planned, but with how bright these get I don't think it makes a difference tbh. I'll have to figure out the shade of blue I want to go for still, this was just some quick tests with the code that was still on the controller to make sure I didn't destroy any of them while soldering.

I also got started on working out the hinge attachment for the top lid. The in-game hinge is... just really weird, so I had to figure something else out for this. I had picked up some aluminum extrusion hinges that would hopefully be the right size, but they're not meant to attach something to a rail perpendicular and have some small protrusions that prevent you from mounting them that way on a rail (that side is usually supposed to go to the end of a rail), so I had to cut two of them out to make it actually fit onto the rail that way.

Also picked up some door plate repair things from the hardware store to actually connect the hinge to the lid since I wanted something stronger than MDF for that. Some questionable bending and cutting later and it things slotted together pretty well with the hinge.

Initially I had hoped I could just cut a partial cutout into the top of the case that the lid sits on to get enough clearance but I did end up having to just cut that into two pieces, which did leave the MDF in that spot pretty unsupported, so I'd have to cut some more spacers for it to rest on. As a side note, the hinge itself won't be the sole support for the lid, and I will have to slightly deviate a bit from the game to accommodate for real life physics by adding one of these toybox hinges on the inside of the lid for support and to prop it open. Coincidentally they also have the perfect attachment points for this. There probably is a way to have it support it's own weight and stay open etc like in the game with different materials and such, but I'm not an engineer lol.

While that takes part of the actual mechanical hinge for now, I still needed to cover that all up to look like the in-game hinge. Thankfully they make PVC pipe in pretty much exactly the size I needed (which I did actually check when making the 3D model haha), and they even had them for sale as smaller sections at the hardware store. Unfortunately I don't own a pipecutter, but I do own a piece of wood and a saw which worked out pretty well to cut off a piece with straight edges. I am going to check if the makerspace has a pipecutter to score those indents into the pipe though.

As I said, fairly uninteresting progress for today but still progress nonetheless. All these small bits do need to be made after all.

 

[Saer]

Unfortunately we're getting to the mostly just tedious and not terribly exiting parts of the build now haha. Lots and lots and lots of woodfiller and sanding and woodfiller and sanding and so on. Not terribly exiting, but terribly messy and dusty. Oh how I wish I had a downdraft table and an orbital sander.

I did cut out the additional spacers to help support the top where the lid sits though, and did some test fitting with the hinge in place. I didn't actually measure out how tall that hinge would be so the fact that it fits perfectly is a small miracle. Still looking for the best way to cut the grooves on the pipe piece currently though.

In between all the sanding and woodfiller I also started on getting all the final 3D prints going. Those are all going to be resin printed in tough resin. I've been kinda dreading this part to be honest since I've had a lot of issues with my resin printer in the past, but honestly I think I was also kind of overthinking it. I also really like the tough resin so far. I used to use Lychee slicer but gave the Anycubic Photon Workshop a shot for this instead since that's also what's installed at the makerspace, and I do like that a lot more personally. Fingers crossed that I didn't just jinx the last three or so prints I still have left to do haha.

 

[TheBeast]

Unfortunately we're getting to the mostly just tedious and not terribly exiting parts of the build now haha. Lots and lots and lots of woodfiller and sanding and woodfiller and sanding and so on.

Yeah, but it's really starting to feel like a thing, not a bunch of pieces, right?

Okay, old man thing, but I hope you are careful sanding charred wood; not good breathing.

I do admire useful props!

I remember folks taking old DVD storage furniture and decorating as a TARDIS, usually filled with amazing things, looking bigger on the inside...

 

[Saer]

Yeah, but it's really starting to feel like a thing, not a bunch of pieces, right?

That is true, yeah. Nice way too look at it haha.

Okay, old man thing, but I hope you are careful sanding charred wood; not good breathing.

Oh absolutely, dust mask and good ventilation, that stuff is not fun. Also settles on everything so I keep having to dust the whole workspace all the time.

I've got the majority of the 3D printing done now, it's just the PSU cover left but I'm out of resin again now. Did some preliminary sanding on some of these to do some test dry fits, and also to check that the electronics actually fit in them now, which they did (yay!). I just gotta remember to pre-paint that latch insert seperately since the LEDs need to go in first and I don't really want to mask those off.

Another dry fit for the side panels, these still need some more woodfiller for getting the right angles and such.

I also came to the point where I finally had to tackle the fact that I had missed some cutout slots on the sides to attach the big sidepanels, so it was finally time to carve those in. They're unfortunately also right where I added some small MDF pieces on the back to connect the flat pieces, so that didn't make things any easier. Took forever with an X-Acto blade, but all my woodcarving tools are in storage still for right now. As long as it worked out in the end I guess. You can also spot the added woodfiller on the sidepanels to get the curved inset details and stuff, and the small angles at the top which were honestly a huge pain. At first I kind of regretted making these sidepanel pieces with three full layers of MDF instead of cutting out a bunch of them to save on weight, but my spouse did point out that in the end they'll probably work pretty well as a counterweight to the weight of the pc components that are on the top of the case haha.

Updates will probably slow down a bit from here on since I'm almost caught up with where I currently am on the build (and also need to save up a bit for getting more materials to continue). I'll probably work on finishing up the LED parts next and getting the code done for the arduino.

 

[Saer]

More bits and pieces coming together, this is pretty much where I currently am at the project.

Tackled getting the grooves into the pvc pipe for the hinge cover, my first idea had been using a pipe cutter to cut some grooves into it, but neither me nor the makerspace had a pipe cutter. What the makerspace does have though is a lathe so that was even better haha. I've only ever used a lathe once before but it's still fun. Kinda makes me wish there were more parts calling for lathing on this build. Now I just need to fashion some kind of rig to get a nice straight cut along the length of the pipe piece.

With the collection of various resin bits printed I got to attaching most of them to the MDF pieces. The smaller top side panels got their angles with some woodfiller, too. The big door latch piece only has the small inserts for the LED parts on it, I have a whole bunch of these now because one of the prints got wonky out of the four I printed, so I just slapped a bunch more of them on the next print plate just in case and of course all of those ended up succesful lol.

Initially I was going to use some small screws or bolts on this back panel that sits under the hinge, but looking at the in game images again I felt like just printing some small covers to match the look would work a lot better.

Since I was getting to a point where I was getting ready to paint at least some of the pieces, I decided to grab some more color reference images in game. A lot of the levels have various colored lighting so many of my screenshots aren't terribly color accurate, but I did find an area that seemed to have fairly neutral lights for this, so I got lots of close up screenshots. And of course realized there were some small bits I missed on my first round of reference shots...

When made the 3D model I wrongfully assumed that the recessed part at the bottom was symmetrical, but looking closely at it again... it's not. I thought there were two small circles/buttons on each side, but they're only on the left, while the right has a single bigger one. Thankfully this ended up solving my issue of hiding the pc power button somewhere, since it had enough clearance away from the aluminum frame behind it to mount the power button behind the right side big button! Yay. Just had to cut a hole into the MDF there, print up some buttons and fill the old circles on that side.

The other thing I realized with the new screenshots was that I missed some LEDs on the sidepanel. The game has a mode that lets you walk through levels without any enemies etc with advanced camera controls to take fancy screenshots, but all of the lockers are inactive and not lit up in that, which is why I initially missed this glow on the side panels. Thankfully, it's in pieces that are 3D printed so I just made some quick edits to those and reprinted them. Also had to drill some holes into the main sidepanels to wire these up later on. I'll need to do some dry assembly of the LEDs in those next to check if the sidepanel piece also needs holes, and I'll probably pre-paint the panels before attaching them to make masking a bit easier. Also forgot that I need four of the little top latch looking things and not just two, so those are still lined up to get reprinted lol.

There's a bunch of moving happening at home these next few days so I'll have to put the build on hold until that's all over. In the meantime I'll be trying to look for some spray paint in the right colors though which will probably be a bit tricky.

There's obviously the main metallic silver, which seems like just a very bright silver that hopefully won't be too hard to find, and the white of the stencils on it. What probably will be more tricky are the gray-ish blue of the sidepanels and hinge, as well as the muted orange/burnt orrange?? of the latches. If anyone has any advice on colors here please let me know.

Also still mulling over how to best approach getting (close to) that PBR metal finish. Gloss clear coat base, sponge on some matte clear coat over it maybe?

 

[Krats]

That looks like a difficult finish to achieve but should be fun to experiment with. Build's looking great. Good luck with the move!

 

[Saer]

That looks like a difficult finish to achieve but should be fun to experiment with. Build's looking great. Good luck with the move!

I'm getting close to doing some paint tests for the metal so that'll be interesting!

Also been a while since the last update, the move blocked off all of my workspace in the garage, then we had to deal with a heatwave and then my phone started to refuse to take any photos so there's a bunch of progress I didn't get to document in there sighs.
I did get some more resin printing done (with some minor setback in between thanks to corrupted files. Managed to get spaghetti when resin printing which was not a fun experience) for the small outside bits, but I still got ... two? more pieces to print for the PSU cover but honestly that can wait for right now. I'm focusing on getting the main housing done currently.

All the smaller pieces are getting primed separately, and all the large main case pieces got primed and painted black on the inside since I wouldn't be able to do that anymore once it's assembled. Don't mind my spray painting setup haha. Also a look at the power button assembly, it's just a circle of MDF as a spacer glued onto a push button, and the 3D printed button on top of that.

The big latch piece also finally had the little inserts added, they ended up nicely fitting the fiber optic tube I had from a previous project to light up later on. The LEDs sit a bit below it without directly attaching to the tube. For the last project I lit those from the end piece as intended, but with the way this is built I can't fit them in like that. Instead I cut the tube in half length wise (with a small notch at the end for a bit more support) and the LEDs diffuse nicely underneath it. This is also around the time my phone started not taking photos properly anymore so I don't have the photos of testing these /:

And as always, can't forget about the "stuff I forgot while designing the 3D model", this time realizing I missed the border at the back and those little indent things, but I did find my woodcut tools again after the move so that kinda worked out I suppose? I'll have to smooth things out a bit with filler but it's also on the back so.... (Once again didn't get more photos than this sighs)

 

[Saer]

The weather finally cooled down a bit so I'm not absolutely melting in the garage anymore, yay. (Hope I didn't jinx it now...) With all the panels primed and painted on the inside it was finally, finally time to put the main body together. Started off with the base plate, which screws into the aluminum frame. I ran out of the right sized bolts at that point and had to order some more which I'd hoped to avoid having to do but oh well.

Once that was on it was onto doing some dry test fitting of the big panels. There was some... adjusting left here and there but asides from that they did fit in properly.

The glueing doesn't look all that different tbh asides from the added clamps lol. I also assembled and slid in the base part of the, well, base for the PSU in the back there.

I'm... still trying to figure out the best way to do the door hinge tbh. I did some test fitting with the main PC components in, and as cool as it would've been to have the doors open in the weird way they do in game I'll have to scrap that since it wouldn't clear the GPU. I'll just have them swing inside without flipping over instead, which does clear the GPU. I think as long as the doors aren't outside when open it'll still look mostly ok and have the same vibe as the game. I'm also starting to develop a personal vendetta against the concept of hinges haha.

 

[Saer]

More assembly progress! Added in the little flap looking things on the sides (and then realized that I completely forgot to paint those black on the inside, sighs). They didn't have anything behind them to keep them at the right height or clamp them while the epoxy glue set so I'm just really really glad they didn't shift or fall into the case during gluing x_x Also glued on the bigger sidepanel... thingies at the bottom, which was definitely a bit nerve wrecking. I noticed that the back part wasn't evenly spaced without applying pressure to them while the glue set, but I had no way of clamping them (one of these days I'll get some nice, really long woodworking clamps....) so the only solution was to turn the whole case on the side, brace the top with some random stuff that was the right height, and put some boxes full of wrench sockets in the bottom to weight things down. A bit sketchy, but worked surprisingly well I gotta say.

All the big pieces were finally glued together! Exciting. While things were drying I attached the LEDs to the top center bolt thing since I realized I'd need to glue that 3D printed part in and seam it flush before I could paint it. I prefer putting in LEDs as the last step if possible so I don't risk getting paint on them, but this one's unavoidable. Same will go for the LEDs at the bottom of the side panels, but those can wait for now. The next big step on the case main body is filling in all the gaps and corners. As for the cutouts on the sides of the front, I thought I had lost the second strip of MDF that goes there but I actually found it again, just need to paint it black on the inside and then those can go in, too. They do have a gap between them and the main body anyways so they won't need any filler between them, so those can go in after the filler, too.

The other thing I took on while things were drying was the panel at the back that's gonna hold the cable connections. I finally got all the cable extensions figured out and measured and spaced out, and then realized I'd have to make that panel from something that's not 5mm thick since the ports sit behind it and having too much thickness there would mean that the cables wouldn't plug in properly. Thankfully my spouse had a spare PC case sidepanel lying around that they had replaced and didn't need anymore, so I got the go ahead to cannibalize that for this project. Initally I had hoped I might be able to use the holes in it for the screw holes, but nothing lined up sadly. I did still use a corner of it for the spot that the power cord extension goes since I still gotta figure out how to actually attach that to the panel since it doesn't have any sort of mounting spots which seems a little silly. I'm hoping I'll be able to bend some of the prongs from the holes inwards to help hold it in place. I don't really have a good way of cutting large pieces of metal here so it was a bit sketchy to get a small piece out of it, and I couldn't find the right glue to glue the paper to the metal so I did my best to scribe things in but my template got a bit skewed when doing the final outer cuts so that's a little crooked overall. I'll be putting a decorative cover over the oustide rim though so I don't think you'll be able to notice anymore... It's also been really long since I last cut anything with my nice little jewelers saw so I broke like... 5 or 6 of the saw blades for it, oops... Anyways, please don't judge my metal cutting skills too harshly lol. I think I'll probably make some sort of cover plate for the whole thing too with enough clearance for all the plugs so maybe you don't even see this thing at all in the end. We'll see what I have time for, since I do have a bit of a deadline on this build. Thankfully last weeks Tennocon did help up my motivation to keep at it!

 

[Saer]

Sanding.... There's really not much else to say haha. I was originally going to use bondo to build up the corners but I'm not having a good time with it actually curing properly so I swapped over to some Free Form Air since I still have a whole bunch of that from other projects. The bondo spot filler putty however is working out great. Still a few more passes of sanding and filling before I'll attach the lid hinge cover, I've held off on that until I finished up the corners and angles on the bottom since I won't be able to stand the case on it's head anymore once that's on. I also think I've figured something out for the door hinges, will be testing that soon. Also finally set up a table for sanding outside the garage...

 

[Saer]

Took a break from sanding, I did decide to pull out all the Bondo in the corners on the case that never fully cured (man I hate that stuff, I still don't know why I even ended up using it sighs) and redo those fully with the Free Form Air instead, which I still gotta sand. In the meantime, I got around to some of the more fun small parts of the build to make things match the lore! This is just something I really enjoy doing haha.

Since this is a pc after all, I wanted to match the components to the whole Corpus/Warframe universe, so all those real world company stickers and decals had to go. The motherboard was the easiest, so started off with that. Here's the before, out of the box motherboard for reference:

While those lines are kinda cool, they're not quite Corpus-y enough. Same goes for all the english writing obviously. Thankfully all of that is on the metal heatsinks, so they were easy enough to take off with some Acetone (though interestingly, the grey print was muuuch more tedious to remove than the black, which came right off). I did give those angled black areas a quick test with acetone, too, but unfortunately the letters on those would not come off at all, but that was ultimately fine. Mostly just my curiosity lol. Here's the board all cleaned off, looking a bit naked now.

To finish things off I cut a bunch of vinyl decals, referencing in game text to find some good snippets to use for this. The angled black parts got a matching black vinyl with the lettering cut out, which I inset with some white vinyl. I didn't really want to layer the vinyl even though it would've been a lot easier and faster, but that's just personal preference.

That was the easy part haha. The GPU was a bit trickier, the fan stickers did come off clean and pretty easily at least though, to be replaced with some corpus logo decals.

The tricky part was the branding on the side of the GPU. The MSI in the middle was easily covered by some black vinyl, with white letters on top. The Geforce RTX however was on a part that was just a bit too big to nicely cover with vinyl, especially since I'd have to match the right side with that as well. Acetone was out of the question since it's on plastic (I did a spot test on the back), so I went with something less harsh instead. While it did take forever I managed to get rid of most of the printing with some denatured alcohol, but there was still some of that silver paint left, and you could still see the slightly raised lettering.

At this point the only thing left unfortunately was sanding it off with the highest grit sandpaper I had lying around. I masked off the area to keep the dust off of the card and made sure to take my time with this, doing a bit of wet sanding at the very end (with some IPA instead of water though just in case). While this did make the surface a bit shinier than the right side, you can barely even tell. Once it's installed in the fairly dark PC case I think no one will notice. For anyone wondering, the new lettering does indeed just say Geforce RTX again, but in corpus script haha.

Now, the backplate of the GPU still has some large lettering on it, but unfortunately it's also super textured plastic so I can't sand that off. I considered replacing the backplate with a custom acrylic cut one, but don't really want to take it apart since I don't know if there's thermal pads attached to the plastic backing. I'll be getting a custom back plate cover made instead (while I could technically make that myself, I don't think I have enough acrylic left for that, and don't want to have to deal with glueing acrylic plates together and matching up the cutouts in the back. I'll leave that to someone who's got way more experience in making those than me).
The last component left to decal (for now, while I still wait on the watercooling components) was the RAM, which was fairly straight forward. I forgot to take before photos of these, so just imagine them with some red snake logos and stuff on them. I did attempt to take the printing off of the metal parts with acetone, but that was super stubborn (and I think you can still very faintly see some red under the white letters there) so I didn't do those for the other sides and just opted for some shapes covering it instead. The clear parts on the side also had red letters that didn't come off with mild solvents, so those also got covered with some shapes and lettering instead. Not the most elegant maybe, but oh well. I'll still have to see if the warranty stickers end up being visible at all and might have to make some sort of removable cover for those if they are.

Phew, lots of stickering! Kinda looking forward to doing some of this to the watercooling components to be honest. In the meantime, back to... sanding.

 

[Saer]

Finally attached the plate that the cables attach to in the back, the MDF cover on top needed to get sanded down to compensate for the metal plate behind it to match up in height with the rest of the case. Also masked off all the ports since I still need to fill in the gaps around the cover with more epoxy clay, and then sand that part down again. Don't wanna get any dust in there...

With the majority of the sanding on the case done I could also finally attach the hinge cover at the top. Needs a bit of filler in some of the small gaps there though still.

In the meantime I also got around to assembling the power supply cover. Glueing things to a power supply feels kinda illegal but it turned out pretty slick in my opinion.

The radiator came in, so that also got it's decorative vinyl at the top. I also made some brackets to actually attach it to the case.

Got around to a few paint tests too, but not... fully convinced with these yet. I've got one more different paint coming in I want to try. This one just feels a bit too dark for my liking, especially when not directly lit. Plus the coverage of the paint itself is ... not great and I'd need to buy sooo much more of it which I'm trying to avoid having to do. It also ended up being really easy to rub off, which again, not ideal. The case will need to get clearcoated anyways since it'll get handled, but still.

While I did say I was going to get the GPU cover plate done by someone else I am gonna end up having to make it myself seeing as the person I contacted never ended up getting back to me. But it's fine, I figured out how to make these and did in fact still have enough leftover material for it. Lil preview of the laser cutting from that.

Lots of kinda small disjointed updates in this one, but there's a lot of waiting on things to arrive, waiting on paint to dry, etc going on right now so I keep swapping around what part I'm currently working on. I'm also trying my best not to stress out too hard about the deadline for this project x_ x

 

[Saer]

Just a quick lil update in between P:

Finished up the GPU cover plate, here's some progress shots of that. I picked up some cool brushed aluminum vinyl for the top of it, the main part is cut from clear acrylic layered with black acrylic on top of it.

Quick lighting tests with my desk light as well as how it looks after adding the vinyl. I installed a thin neopixel strip on the side of it for the final lighting.

Also got the PSU all painted up now, pretty pleased with how that turned out to be honest. Can't wait to shove it in a dark pc case where you won't be able to see like 3/4 of this anyways :,)

Aaaaaand one more paint test for the case's main body. This one is a lot brighter, and has more of that aluminum finish to it that I wanted, so that's what I decided on as the final color to go with. Still gotta do some weathering tests on these. I tried to find a painting system that looks good in direct and indirect light and I think this is the closest I'm gonna get haha.

 

[Saer]

Been a bit since the last update, sorry, been pretty busy working on this haha.

Here's some progress from doing dry fitting with the doors and attaching them after they got their interior black coat.

In the meantime I also worked on figuring out the best diffusion methods for the LEDs on the latch and the side panel as well as prepping the side panel LEDs for installing. I first thought I'd have to install them before attaching those little tabs they sit in, but I ended up not using the circuit board mounted neopixels but instead the classic LED shaped ones, so I could just drill a small hole on the inside to slot them through later instead. Quite satisfied with these tbh!

My initial plans for how to do the small cover on the connection of the lid to the "hinge" also didn't end up working out how I thought (I think if the actual hinge sat a bit further into the fake hinge cover it might have, but alas.) It just didn't clear over the hinge cover, so I ended up having to cut some more slots into the hinge cover and redo the connecty bit quite a bunch. I... don't think I actually took a photo of that though? So here's just the failed attempt I guess.

With the doors attached and the hinge cover figured out I once again tackled the issue of the lid actually staying open. I ended up scrapping the toy box hinge because it only came in a variant to attach on one side, which made the lid quite lop sided when open which I absolutely hated. So after a bunch of mulling over I eventually settled on using some push rods with their accompanying hinges usually meant for RC cars. I found a reasonably priced set of the rod ends and ball studs in the right size for the rods which is... where the troubles began haha. Ordered them off of ebay from some RC shop and waited patiently for them to arrive.

Imagine my surprise then when all that I received was a set of just the ball studs (the little screws with the ball shaped head), but no rod ends which are... kind of essential to the assembly here. Contacted the seller assuming there might've just been a mix up when packaging the order, but uh apparently the manufacturer made a running change on that part number and it's only the ball studs now? They just straight up no longer make it as a set like that so and apparently the seller doesn't even have the ability to carry it any longer. So that was great. The seperate set of rod ends they pointed me at cost more than the set of ball studs and rod ends I had ordered... (As a not so fun side note, while I was waiting on the reply from the seller on ebay I decided to see if a dedicated RC seller website also carried the set, which they did, so I ordered from there in the meantime before I found out the manufacturer had made that change, and without realizing that it was just the website of the ebay store I had originally ordered from... that was fun.) It's honestly really annoying how a lot of RC part sellers don't have any basic measurements or sizing of parts on their websites (like at least the rod size the rod ends go with??) so it took me two tries to find the right size rod ends seperately. The whole thing took like a month probably just to get these stupid parts in.

All that aside though, once I had the parts I lasercut some small attachment pieces out of MDF. They sandwhich a pair of bolts in between (that I had to cut down to size since apparently I'm all out of the right length of them), which then get attached to the extruded aluminum frame on the top frame. The ball studs screw into one of the small holes on the inside, and the other hole gets a push rod screwed into it that just connects the two MDF pieces on each side to keep them more aligned with each other. The push rods then attach to the inside of the lid. The MDF pieces tilt down and lock in place once the lid is open and putting pressure on them, keeping the lid open. Pushing back on the rods a bit pulls them back up, allowing the lid to close. Probably a terrible explanation, sorry.