Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to My 1st ever scratch build project.........



A couple of weekends ago, out of sheer boredom I decided to finally put pencil to paper and came up with this basic design for how the bench would look from the side:



I had recently seen a few pics of Primochill's "Wet Bench" on Facebook and decided I had to "try" and come up with something new myself. So I decided as I work on the design I might borrow a few ideas from the wet bench, mostly so far the one idea I really liked was the use of "pass through" connection points for the liquid cooling setup. Anyway, last week I was talking about my design with a new mate of mine and he suggested that I use styrofoam and build myself a 3D mockup of my bench...since I cannot for the life of me figure out how to use Sketchup....hence my crappy hand drawing lol 😛 so tonight sitting in front of my pc and going out of my mind from boredom again and realizing that since my backside is broke, I can't get any styrofoam. I was out the back and it hit me!!! my Sister had recently bought her 2yr old daughter a toddler sized bed....PERFECT!!!! the box hadn't been broken down, so I grabbed the cardboard box, my crummy hand drawings, my pencil, a Meter steel ruler, a sharpie and a pair of scissors and set about working on building the 3D model of my test bench 😄

Marking out some basic lines in pencil, yes, that box is freaking huuuuge :eek:


Using my trusty sharpie to go over the lines - side panel


Cutting out said side panel with scissors. Note to self: find your bloody stanley knife(retractable razor cutter) before you mess with more cardboard later on ya moron!! :rolleyes:


Marking out the "Motherboard tray area":


Motherboard tray cut out:


Measured then cut out the bottom tray, for PSU, HDD, SSD & most likely a fan controller:


All 4 main pieces together, looking fairly ok lol:



Hmmm, seems I missed a pic that I thought I took, before assembling of the model began, I was wondering how i'd put it all together...mostly keeping the bottom "tray" to stay put...then I had a little brainy moment and used some brass screws to hold the tray up, then used some tape to hold it in place.

Starting to slowly assemble:


Got through assembly, though the damn thing kept falling side to side...lack of structural integrity of course!! duh me...I forgot the back panel for an up to a 360mm rad!!! here it is, measured and cut:


Aaaand here it is, fully assembled, only took me just a bit over 2 hours to measure, cut and assemble...even with a pair of crappy scissors lol
Front View:


Top-down front view:


Side view:


Rear view:



Apologies for the crap pics, but these were taken with my Samsung Galaxy SII 😛