Neptune's Trident by Brian Carter

Paint Job and Other Details

The case paint job was another opportunity for me to challenge myself. As I always like to include the peripherals (keyboard and monitor) in the theme, the paint was a way of bringing it all together.

The colour was a given, but I wanted something extra to finish off the whole project. I remembered seeing a water-drop effect on custom hot-rods and knew that was what I was looking for, but I didn’t know how it was achieved. My friend and I researched the technique and tried numerous practice pieces until we settled on a method that yielded the result we were after.


We were still apprehensive, due to the fact that in order to make it work, we needed to physically spray water onto fresh paint… something that would totally ruin a normal paintjob! But it held up and turned out amazingly well. For a stark contrast, I went with a gloss-white pearlescent paint for the interior and accents.


Other minor details that contributed to the overall theme include the custom fan grills I designed and cut out of mirrored acrylic, the abstract trident shape I cut out of the mesh boxes (mimicking the side window), the custom tubing guides I made to keep all the tubing running even, the ATX power cable that I split into three parts, sleeved and routed through the middle panel.


The third wheel-set I added to the bottom, and the backlit name badge on the edge of the middle panel. I also went to great lengths to keep the wiring as short as necessary to minimize the clutter.