Art Deco Zenith 5-s-29 Radio Case Mod

Modelling

I have spent two months working almost daily in Sketchup modeling to the tune of probably 200+ hours (fortunately I have a lot of downtime at work where I can use my laptop). This includes time I spent modeling several of the Bitspower rotary fittings which have been posted on the Sketchup Components Collection website.

I was dealing with a couple of pretty tight areas and wanted to have the fittings modeled to get an exact placement of components. I messed with every combination of placement using triple radiators I could think of.

I prefer using dual triple rads as I like a system to be as quiet as possible as well as being future proof. I also wanted the dimensions of this build to be smaller than my current case due to the way that it fits inside of my desk.


I spent a lot of time hashing out the placement of each component and the loop order of the setup down to every last detail I could think of. For example, I designed at least five different hard drive mounts alone. I do not like T-lines. I designed and redesigned the res to make it easily accessible for filling with the pump directly beneath it for good water supply to the pump. I have never spent anywhere near the amount of time designing a setup as I have this one.

SketchUp

Sketchup is such a wonderful tool for projects like this. Every part can be placed to scale, exactly measured, and dimensions drawn and printed. I export full dimension views, resize them in Photoshop, and print them out.
This gives me working blueprints to build from.

I made some changes to my original design and am going to make a metal divider that the MB tray will mount to so that the rads will pull in outside air and vent it out of the top and back. This way the rads get fresh air, and the rad air will be isolated from the case airflow.