Tonight's Quicksilver task.

eyoungren · Jun 28, 2014

Add bottom fan. Done.

I've seen a few case mods for PCs that put in a fan in the bottom. I determined that this might help me, so I did it myself too.

Bought this fan today. 110CFM. Also replaced the intake fan, 21CFM.

Tomorrow, clean up and attach VGA cooler from donated ATI Radeon 9800 Pro to my own 9800 Radeon Pro. Apparently, the fan on mine was not working and I didn't know it.

Got some thermal paste for that today too.

Sunday, probably putting it all back together.

Bonus: Learned how to jumper an ATX power supply today so that it runs without being attached to a logicboard. Going to hook another 250W PSU up to power just my drives and fans and leave the main PSU to power just the logicboard and cards and devices plugged into same.

Eventually, I'll get that ATX PSU but this will work for now.

At some point I will actually begin the job of trying to either fix the old OS install or restart fresh.

eyoungren · Jun 28, 2014

One more pic

harrymatic · Jun 28, 2014

Looks quite good actually! It will be interesting seeing the temperatures when it's all put back together and running. At least you won't have any more power problems with the secondary PSU.

wobegong · Jun 28, 2014

Good luck, you'll probably have the best QS in existence at this rate

robertdsc · Jun 28, 2014

wobegong said:
Good luck, you'll probably have the best QS in existence at this rate

He already does. That thing is magnificent.

eyoungren · Jun 28, 2014

Breaktime!

Gone as far as I'm feeling it today.

It helps when you put a VGA cooler together that you don't forget to put parts in the right places before you tighten things down!

Generally reassembled. Need to add my drives back in. Which is going to mean placement of the secondary PSU. I've determined that that will be outside the case. I'll be routing the power cables through one of the PCI slots. I took the holder off my PCI SATA card (leaving the SATA card in place) and I'll route the cables through there.

Kind of a FrankenMac, but this isn't a laptop so it'll do until I get the more powerful PSU.

eyoungren · Jun 29, 2014

Fixing the OS

Well…Today's (Sunday's) project was to attempt to repair my installation. DW ran, repaired drive. In preparation of cloning from my boot drive to my secondary drive which has a faster cache, I moved content off the secondary drive. I then attempted to boot via Open Firmware/USB from the boot drive. No dice.

So…I'm really trying to avoid reinstalling the OS. I took a shot at rerunning the 10.5.8 combo update. Voila!!!!

Boot from USB!!!! I am now repairing permissions! I will reinstall the wireless update after this and then my Gigameter install (for the CPUs), repair permissions again and finally clone the boot drive to the secondary drive.

It's slow at the moment because all of this is running off my 17" 1.0Ghz PB at USB 1.1 speeds. However, when I copied files off it was really nice using my USB 2.0 PC card for both boot and secondary drives.

I'll do that again once I begin the clone process. When I'm done with that it's on to final assembly and seeing if everything I've done comes together. Probably tomorrow night.

keysersoze · Jun 30, 2014

eyoungren said:
Going to hook another 250W PSU up to power just my drives and fans and leave the main PSU to power just the logicboard and cards and devices plugged into same...

Sorry in advance if this is a silly question... perhaps you've answered it in one of your threads... but couldn't you just put in one PSU with larger output? Instead of needing two power supplies?

Also, did you remove any part of the QS when you added the bottom fan? Was there a finger guard? I've never looked too closely at the insides of one before.

Good job, all around.

eyoungren · Jun 30, 2014

keysersoze said:
Sorry in advance if this is a silly question... perhaps you've answered it in one of your threads... but couldn't you just put in one PSU with larger output? Instead of needing two power supplies?

Also, did you remove any part of the QS when you added the bottom fan? Was there a finger guard? I've never looked too closely at the insides of one before.

Good job, all around.

One PSU, sure. But the one I'm looking at right now is about $80. A cheaper version is about $20 less. Right now, I can't afford that. I do happen to have two PCs lying around that aren't being used however, so I thought in the meantime I would try this.

The area I cut out is the first drive bay and part of the second drive bay. The drive caddy was removed (I did that a while back anyway) and the metal plates that screw to the bottom of the two bays were removed. Towards the front (where the IDE cables are is the third drive bay. It has two pieces. One is a metal frame over the cables and the second is a metal plate. I put the metal frame back when I reassembled things.

So, when I made the hole it was just through the solid metal case itself.

keysersoze · Jun 30, 2014

eyoungren said:
One PSU, sure....

So, when I made the hole it was just through the solid metal case itself.

Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanations. It definitely makes sense to use the parts if you already have them!

What tools did you use to chop out the hole in the plate for the fan?

eyoungren · Jun 30, 2014

keysersoze said:
What tools did you use to chop out the hole in the plate for the fan?

Nothing special, LOL!

My garage is a mess hit by a tornado (another project to do) so finding what I really was looking for was impossible. I would have much preferred using tools that are specific to this type of thing, but sadly all I had was a drill, a hacksaw blade and some electrical snips.

I drew a hole outside the case using the fan itself and taking a sharpie marker to outline it. Then, I drilled four holes. One at the top, bottom and left/right sides of the hole. Then it was a matter of following the marker line with the drill. Drilling holes that overlapped. Because of the nature of that I ended up with what looks like a sawtooth blade type hole. The clipper I used to cut from hole to hole in spots where I did not end up overlapping with the drill. And I was also using the hacksaw blade to do the same.

Not pretty, not the way I wanted to do it, but it worked.

I consider this QS to be my test pancake. Everything I'm doing is to find out what works and what doesn't. By the time I'm done I'll know what I need to do so I can replicate this with another QS, but in the planning for that project I'll have both the tools and the parts set up beforehand. Every idiot mistake I make in this project (and I've made a lot) will contribute to the beauty of that project when I get there.

P.S. Pro tip! Don't try to unscrew a spinning plastic CPU fan with a metal screwdriver! The plastic fan blades will lose every time!

happyfrappy · Jun 30, 2014

Good work, however I laughed a bit seeing two boxes of Parallels Desktop v5 nearby

eyoungren · Jun 30, 2014

happyfrappy said:
Good work, however I laughed a bit seeing two boxes of Parallels Desktop v5 nearby

LOL! Yeah, I thought someone might clue into that!

Got those from a friend who was moving. I gave him a 32GB iPhone 3GS because he needed a phone and that was his generosity towards me. He actually gave me three, but the third one is here at work where the only Intel Mac I have around is.

keysersoze · Jun 30, 2014

eyoungren said:
I drew a hole outside the case using the fan itself and taking a sharpie marker to outline it. Then, I drilled four holes. One at the top, bottom and left/right sides of the hole. Then it was a matter of following the marker line with the drill. Drilling holes that overlapped...

Ah, up in these parts we call that Yankee Ingenuity! nice going. I probably would've gotten some tinsnips out and butchered it up real good. hah.

eyoungren · Jun 30, 2014

keysersoze said:
Ah, up in these parts we call that Yankee Ingenuity! nice going. I probably would've gotten some tinsnips out and butchered it up real good. hah.

Yeah, my dad taught me that. We needed to cut a hole in the roof once for a vent and he had just a jigsaw and a drill. He traced out the hole, then drilled four holes (as I described earlier). Then he took the jigsaw and started cutting hole to hole. The drilled holes gave the jigsaw blade access and provided a point of reference as to where you needed to be cutting to. He of course explained all this to me when we were doing it.

I just applied all that to this. Where I shot myself in the foot was getting the screw holes for the four screws that hold the fan in place in the right places. Had to use a a washer on one of them because I ended up drilling three holes trying to get it right.

keysersoze · Jun 30, 2014

eyoungren said:
Yeah, my dad taught me that. We needed to cut a hole in the roof once for a vent and he had just a jigsaw and a drill. He traced out the hole, then drilled four holes (as I described earlier). Then he took the jigsaw and started cutting hole to hole. The drilled holes gave the jigsaw blade access and provided a point of reference as to where you needed to be cutting to.

I just did that this winter when I had to cut a new hole for a closet flange in our bathroom subfloor! hahaha! great minds!

eyoungren · Jul 1, 2014

Final phase!

Clone went fine, after a SuperDuper hitch. Stopped cloning in the middle of the job. I finished up with CCC and booted from the USB drive. I am now repairing permissions on the 1TB/32MB cache drive. When done, I will erase the former boot drive.

After thatit's final assembly. Drives back into the case, power leads hooked up and fans hooked up, closed up and then we see what happens!

Tonight's Quicksilver task.

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