Fire case by Wolverine

Well, Dreamhack has now come and gone, and I put in a modding marathon for that LAN party, with lots of work needing to be done. However, I'm not done yet, there is plenty more modding left in me yet!

For my new modding project, I have chosen to do four cases all themed around the elements (Earth, Wind, Fire, Water - no, not the band). This is the first case:

Fire.

The base case for this mod is the absolutely incredible Lian Li modular cube case - this beast can easily swallow twenty drives and still have plenty of room left. Look out for a full review on bit-tech soon.

This mod isn't as spectacular as my Biomech project, as I've tried to keep in line with the Lian Li's clean look, but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. I think that it's definitely simple but effective.

Leftside cutout

The first thing I did was to design two window cutouts that I felt accurately captured ' fire'! I used the Japanese symbol for fire as the base and then added a flame design around it.


I first did an engraving of the cutout to get a feel for the look and to get some good lines to follow when cutting. Since the cut out was fairly complex, I decided not to go with the standard Dremel cutting disks and went with a router table instead. I used an original Dremel metal cutting bit which cut through the aluminium like a hot knife through butter.


As you can see, the cutting leaves quite a mess. The cutting was actually really time consuming. Since the cutting bit was so effective, I had to go really slow - since any mistake would be impossible to fix! If anyone had bumped into me whilst doing this the whole thing would have been cut in half.

You can see the firesign completed here - I've used a bit of red plastic behind it to give a taste of what the effect will be when its done.


Now onto the tricky part. The flames took a lot more concentration.