HighSpeed PC Tech Station

Assembly cont.

Moving past the issue with the barcodes, the actual installation of the case fans was straightforward and did the job nicely.





The pre-drilled holes were clearly labelled and once you know which hole you need, the label peels off cleanly. The L-brackets are held in place with a 0.25-inch screws and the end result is extremely sturdy.



Here are those "missing" hard drive rails. Unlike the rest of the kit, these parts are made from clear acrylic. They mount on small feet and hang from the underside of the upper panel. Standard 3.5-inch hard drives slide in and out smoothly, and there is no danger of your drive falling out.



The final step before we can fit the upper panel is to add the neoprene non-slip material on which the PSU and optical drives is designed to sit. This was a simple as laying it in place and driving a screw into the pre-drilled holes in each corner. Each screw has a neat plastic cap to cover the screw and the end result is nice and clean.

Problems

As you can see, all did not go smoothly. The vertical supports have pilot holes but they are not pre-tapped with a screw thread - you are driving self-tapping screws into the top and as the manual suggested at the beginning, a basic screwdriver is not enough.




Try as we might, we could not achieve a flush finish. Even with one person pushing down on the panel with a second person putting their full body weight onto the screwdriver, the screw simply refused to bite down any further. Again, the manual warned us that "small gaps between bench surfaces and the vertical supports" might occur if assembling by hand using a screwdriver, but despite promises that "this won't affect performance" we can't help but see this as a design flaw rather than something to be ignored.

To make matters worse, when we really tried hard to tighten the screw, the protective cap rotated and tore the neoprene. Great. HighSpeed PC inform us that they are working on a new version of the Tech Station that should feature an "integrated non-slip surface" but for now, this solution is disappointing.