It's looking great! Nearly got it over the finishing line. Have you already got the PC to put in it or are you going to worry about that once it's done?
Thank you! It's really satisfying to finally see things coming together, definitely giving me the push of motivation needed to finish things haha.
I've already got all the parts for the pc to go in it, had to make sure that everything actually fits since I wanted to keep the case as small as I can (even though it would've been super cool to do a full size locker I wouldn't have anywhere to actually put that sadly...)
Another update for good measure as well from the last two days (I think I spent almost 12 hrs working on this thing yesterday which honestly was really satisfying. I don't like those parts of projects where you're just waiting for some glue to dry or something and can't work on it until that's done so this was pretty refreshing....)
Took off all the masking stuff and did my best to give the inside of the case a really thorough clean to get all the dust and stuff out of it, and touched up a bunch of the inside parts with some black paint. Also glued on the little screws and I gotta say I'm really happy with how those turned out. In game I believe they're just normal round screws, but the rendering makes it look like they have some facets to them which I really liked so I tried to sculpt them that way, even if it's technically speaking not accurate I do really like this look a lot more. Looks more Corpus, too, in my opinion.
The airbrush didn't hit the sides of the vent slots (and I didn't want to risk them getting too oversprayed there) so I had to go in with a brush to darken them up. This honestly was a much bigger pain to do than I expected for some reason?? But I got through all of them and it looks a looot better. So here's a before and after of that.
Then it was finally time to plan out the wiring for the LEDs. I'm trying to keep them fairly hidden, so I'll be running them inside the grooves of the aluminum rails. You can see where the LEDs for those little latch looking things on the side panels attach through the inside on the second pic there.
Speaking of LEDs, now's also the time to finally add all the diffusion for the LEDs on the orange parts.
Then lots of more little bits. I'm cutting a bunch of panels from this PC case mesh stuff to cover all the vent slits from the inside. Usually those get attached with magnetic strips that just attach to the case, but since this case is... not metal they're just gonna get glued in. I pulled up the full manual for the motherboard I'll be using to check the pinouts, and thankfully they have pretty thorough documentation of those. Just wish they'd still give you a print version of that and not just a pdf that you have to go digging for. I'm kinda hoping I'll be able to use this random speaker I pulled from a laptop to add for some startup beeps, but the wires on it were actually too thin to crimp to the header connector so I had to solder some thicker leads to them which looks a bit ridiculous, but they'll be hidden away anyways. Also wired up the power button while I was at it.
Next I had to tackle the USB connections. While I do have the USB slots at the back through the extension cables, I also wanted some hidden USB ports at the front to connect my keyboard and mouse dongle. That's also the reason I left those slots on the bottom black part open, too. I'll be using the USB header connection on the motherboard that's usually used for front panel USB ports anyways for this. So more soldering and trying not to get all the wires tangled lol. I did unfortunately run out of the Corpus appropriate colors of wire after the first USB port unfortunately so I had to go with some random colors for the second one. They'll get covered up anyways with some cable wrap so it didn't terribly matter in the end (pls don't judge me on my soldering and cable wrapping job...).
In the meantime I modeled and printed some cable clips. The tiny ones got used for routing the cables along the lid. You can also see the mesh covering the vent holes attached already there.
While we're on the lid, let's also attach the bolt slidy thing. I apparently never got a picture of this either, but the green clamp looking thing has a magnet on the underside, as does the bolt itself, so it'll stay in place when the lid is open. You can also see how the wires get fed through that little slot there. The green clamp basically just guides the bolt, and I just glued the orange part to just the bolt so it can slide up and down freely. It's already a pretty tight fit on the bolt part itself, it actually stayed on just with friction already but I don't wanna risk it falling off.
Lastly just some boring stuff, I finally found a good place for the enclosure of the LED controller (I just personally dislike having to run my LED lighting through a program on my pc, hence why I'm doing it this way.) and testing out the routing for the big extension cables that need to run up to the ports on the motherboard. I still need to model up and print a little clip thing to attach it to the aluminum rail there.
The idea behind that clear tube btw is that there's this cool looking cable thing in game that I always thought was super sick, with these glowing corpus letters running along it:
I've done some quick tests previously with a small cut off piece by masking off the letters and then hydrodipping it. When I did that test I removed the masks at different stages, the kinda bad looking letters at the bottom and middle left had the mask removed right after dipping which just... looks bad. With the other ones I took the mask off before dipping and suprisingly enough the film still adhered pretty well to the clear pipe there, but was transparent enough that light shines through! I'm really glad that that worked out the way it did, since this way the letters will be pretty much invisible when not illuminated. I also lasercut some little end pieces so it's not just raw pipe at the ends (and to hide my probably not perfect cutting, too lol).
You gotta keep an eye on those RC parts sellers for sure.
