Yuugou by Greensabbath

Hard Disks & DVD Drive

At first, I figured since the DVD drive and hard drives weren’t front and centre, I planned to simply slap them on the wall and call them good.

I later re-thought this and figured that since everything else is so well thought out and well done, I might as well make this section good too.

I spent the better part of a week designing this section. I made numerous templates out of plywood and cardboard to figure out an integrated system to hold both the slim DVD drive and hard drives in an elegant way while still keeping it simple and functional.

After some time, I came up with this design and started making it the same way I made the rest of the curving aluminium pieces, a combination of templates and the router table.



For the DVD drive, I chose to mill out a 3/4" block and inset the DVD drive into this. Unfortunately, because the shop only had a 3/8" mill bit, this took forever (and I destroyed the bit in the process) but after about eight hours of milling, it was finished. I then milled two small slots on the bottom of the DVD drive holder to accept the hard drive holder. I then milled the slot for the drive.


To make this assembly easier to take out, I decided to attach it to a piece of aluminium that would act as a second front plate. This also enabled me to keep any screws off of the visible front plate along with the option of cutting out a design on the front plate. To attach this “second front plate” I made “keys” into the main aluminium support and it gets screwed in from the front.


The last step involved a cover for the hard drive holder itself to cover up the hard drives and give another canvas for a design to be cut in the aluminium. It took a while to figure out exactly what to write but in the end I chose the Japanese character for “Light” since the light from the CCFLs shines over this area and it just seemed like a cool and somewhat significant thing to put here.

I cut the design out with a scroll saw and sanded it smooth with sand paper. In the end I also put rice paper behind the character to make it stand out against the black of the powder coat.

Fans

It's no secret that I am in love with the Evercool aluminium fans. I actually bought about ten of them and used five on this project alone. There was really only one good way to cut the fan holes in the aluminium frame and that was to use a jig saw for the rough cut, and the same template / router table method for the final cuts.

To make this easier, I put the screw holes on the template too to make them uniform. In this case, instead of using bolts to secure these fans like normal, I just screwed into the fan frames themselves.