Sangaku Japanese case mod

Fans

Nick sourced some really nice aluminium Evercool fans: 120mm for the front; 92mm rear exhaust and another 92mm for the heatsink, a Thermalright XP-90C.


Out of the box, these fans come with blue LEDs but Nick preferred white, so he swapped out the LEDs for some clear ones. Somehow, a blue glow just wouldn't sit right with ancient Japan.

Having solved that anachronism, it was time to work on the mounting of these bad boys.


Starting with the front panel of acrylic, he measured a 114mm hole near the bottom to serve as the front 120mm fan inlet and used a circle cutter to create this (far right). He also cut out a 120mm square and created an identical hole in the middle of that. The idea was to create an acrylic sandwich for mounting the fan, rather than just bolt through only the frontside holes. You'll understand the idea soon enough.

With the mounting under control, it rapidly became obvious that shiny aluminium fans - as cool as they are - were more the domain of Orac³ than 17th Century Japan. Nick decided the easiest solution was to paint them black.


This required several coats of primer, and a final outer coat of sexy gloss black. This meant Nick could use the fans wherever necessary without the gaudy silver ruining the look of my case.

The same could be said about fan grills actually. There is no way he could use standard chrome grills, for obvious reasons, and it's rarely a good idea to run without any kind of finger guard. The solution was a simple geometric design along the lines of the Japanese lamp shown at the start of this article. Nick used cypress because it's easy to work with and resists cracking and splitting.





Having created the matrix, Nick trimmed it to fit the other "slice" in his acrylic "sandwich" using his super sharp knife and fine-toothed dozuki woodworking saw.