BaDassumption Part 1

The Design

Fast forward about forty years and you find me hanging out at Wizard Designs with a bunch of people that are into modifying personal computers. It wasn't every day things like lights and bigger fans, but some pretty serious, outrageous kind of stuff that's probably a little crazy in the eyes of a "normal" person.

Anyway, we got to talking about what a real "over-the-top" PC might be and I started doodling around in SketchUp, an easy to use 3D modelling program, sharing and swapping ideas over a period of a few weeks with the folks at WizD. The result of those few weeks was this bubble topped, liquid cooled, multiple pod creation…

The idea was to have the power supply in its own pod, as well as the radiator, with the pump hanging out front between a pair of quasi frame rails. The optical pod would be separate, placed near the monitors.

Building the Pods

Since I was wanting to keep things rather simple and having some curves in the corners, the idea of making the pods in upper and lower halves seemed to make pretty good sense. To keep things simple, all three of the boxy pods were made the same height. To even further simplify them, the use of an internal frame that we're so accustomed to seeing in a PC was avoided entirely, by using 0.100" thick aluminium.

The pieces were sheared and formed by Bayfab Metals in San Leandro, California. Sheet metal work is rarely precise, but the guys at Bayfab did such a primo job on these pieces that I only had to do a little bit of squaring up after the pod halves were put together. A belt sander with 120 grit was used to do the squaring.

I had gone on a parts scrounging hunt for anything made out of billet aluminium that could be used on the rig, and the collection was pretty sizeable. Because of this, it was time to do a little redesign to incorporate some of these finds. Most important were billet grilles designed for an F-350 Ford truck, an aftermarket aluminium tachometer housing for a Harley, a billet short shifter from a Ford Mustang and a radiator overflow tank from Billet Specialities. The revised design looked like this, with a paint job styled after the George Barris Ala Kart.