BOSS: FX57 by TechDaddy

Foamy

Finding a break in the action, I grabbed my CoolDrive3. The CoolDrive is a hard drive housing that fits in a 5.25" bay. The regular hard drive sits in the middle of an aluminium housing with a small fan blowing across. The CoolDrive3 comes with 2 blue LED's that were easily swapped with white.

The mounting was actually through a small PCB in the rear of the face plate, so removal was actually a bit tricky for me, the extreme utter noob with a soldering iron! But, I perservered and the CoolDrive matched the rest of the front lighting to make for a "dashboard" type of feel.

Having the scoop base created out of aluminium, I then stepped into a ghetto hack for custom body forming. I used canned spray insulation and sprayed it all over the exposed aluminum scoop and made liberal use of it including spreading the first few beads along the joint between the aluminum and the top of the scoop. For those that have never used it, spray foam is very sticky. It is designed to adhere to just about any surface. It has to, as it is sprayed into spaces to fill in gaps and you never know what two pieces of material you will be sprayed between.

Once this stuff sets up, it is insanely strong! Even better, in my book, is that you can cut the foam down with a knife to shape it into any shape you want! I wanted to test a few things with the design of the scoop with regards to placement and design.

Lesson learned on the first layer of foam? Always shake up your foam very well... I did not do this, and I had a section fall like a really bad souffle! The cool part about this is that I could fix it with, yep, another layer of the spray foam! I simply sprayed it into the weak bubble that did not cure properly, and it just filled in the bum section without missing a beat. Cool stuff actually! when you start cutting off the foam material, have a large plastic bag ready, because you have the potential for a *big* mess!

I likely went way overboard on the spraying of this stuff, but I knew I was cutting it down, so (in this case) I'd rather have too much than not enough. Also, I was experimenting with how the scoop was going to lay. If it was going to end perpendicular to the top of the case, or if it was going to angle flush into the edge.