Summer...

Well its been a while since I have posted or updated anything. Life has been very busy lately.
 I am going to try to keep this blog updated. There are many things to be added.

New Car

Well, I've always wanted a cool old car to wrench on. My good friend's dad who was getting rid of a bunch of cars offered to sell me his 65' Falcon Ranchero. I thought the car was awesome and I was able to talk my parents into letting me get it!

 

Awesome ride, but a very big project. lots of rust and everything needed work, But I was very willing to conquer the project. It was to have a 289 with a toploader 4 speed. A cool car indeed.

Three days later, as I got off work I looked across the street to the another warehouse and noticed a 64' Falcon Futura with a "For Sale" sign on it. I decided to go take a look

The thing looked awesome. There was almost no rust on the body or the underbody (its a uni-body), it even had 90% of the frame paint still on! The interior was near perfect. there wasn't a rip anywhere on the seats. The headliner was the worst with a few holes where a mouse got into it. The worst thing on the body was a few dents on the passenger side and a ding on the trunk and bumper.

The owner came out of the warehouse and started telling me about it. It has 20,000 original miles! Its a straight 6 170ci with a "three on the tree" manual transmission.Pretty much everything is original, except tires of course, and the front fenders. He went to start it and it fired right up! I asked him how much he wanted for it and he said 1200 bucks. I told him I would talk to him later that night.

I talked with my parents and I they were skeptical at first, but I talked them into going to look at it. My dad drove it and said "we have to buy this". It ran great and drove good. We scheduled to buy it two days later.

Pretty nice, this is the bad side with the dents.

My niece checking checkin' out the nice chrome.

 

I little surface rust on the hood.

 

Crack in the dash glass. I have since replaced it.

The Afterburners...

 It came with the missing trim pieces.

 This was  a radio delete model.

Fancy Keyboard(s)

Well, I'm building a sweet computer and I thought I should have a nice keyboard to go with it. I really like the keys on my Apple II and thought about buying a keyboard from one, but I couldn't find any for sale. I also like the idea of having peripherals that all look like they're from a different time period, so I decided I would probly build an Art Deco style keyboard with typewriter keys. So, Steampunk computer, Art Deco keyboard, modern apple cinema display, etc.

   After seeing some awesome keyboards like the ones by "Datamancer" I decided I wanted to do something similar.

 

     I still needed a keyboard, so I did some research and discovered the IBM Model M. The M is a keyboard introduced by Ibm in 1984 for terminals. The M is considered to be the best keyboard of all time and many people (and geeks/nerds) still use them today because they're built so well that its almost impossible to wear them out. Another great thing about them (probly the best) is that they have mechanical key-switches instead of bubble contacts like all other modern keyboards (save a few companies who still make mechanical keyboards, but they are still considered inferior to the model m). Mechanical key-switches give a nice tactile feel and a loud clicky sound when pressed. Did I say loud? I meant LOUD! Once you type on one though, you'll never want to go back to anything else. Its a much more satisfying feeling than the squishy craptastic keyboards bundled with computers today.

      I went on eBay and found an early model M (grey label). These are slightly better quality than the ones built after 1992 (blue label). I finally got it and opened the box. It had one of those keyboard covers on it and I took it off to find that it was in PERFECT condition! I mean it was as clean as the day it was new! there was no way I was going to modify such a perfect example of a model m. So, I decided to just use it as is.

   

     A couple of weeks later my brother in law found me another Model M (blue label). This one was in much worse shape. Well, its still in pretty good shape, just really dirty, but you can tell the action is slightly heavier that my nice one, still really nice though. So now Ill have one to mod!

I decided to clean it up anyway.

Its kinda hard to see from the pictures, but this one is filthy. 

This is with the keycaps off. Did I mention the keycaps are removable?  I forgot to take a picture with them on to show how dirty they were.

Here's the keycaps after I let them soak for a day.

Yuck! Nasty keyboard crap!

Did I mention these things have drainage ports for when they get spilled on? Yeah, It looks like they were really designed to last!

Yeah, thats a steel plate... This is part of the reason these tanks weigh so much.(~6lbs?)

 Ah, much better.

 This is the older M disassembled. Look at how clean it is!

 

Now that's a grounding cable if I ever saw one! What? Did they think this thing was going to get struck by lightning?

Over-engineering, thats how I like it!

Steampunk Hackintosh build

Hackintosh is the term used for a non Apple computer running Mac OSX. I had heard about Hackintosh a few years ago but heard that it didn't run well and had stability issues, so I didn't give it much thought.

   Recently me and my friends were talking about computers and Hackintosh came up, so when I got home I did some research on it. I found that if you use the right components you can end up with a very stable machine. I was all over the idea because I have always wanted to build a desktop from scratch, but still wanted to run osx. Also, you can make a very powerful machine for much cheaper than buying a real mac, granted one of the the main reasons you buy a mac is for the high quality hardware, but I still prefer osx to windows.

  I wanted to choose hardware that was similar to the hardware used in Apple computers so it would be as stable as possible. I ended up finding a Gigabyte z68x-ud3h-b3 motherboard with 8gb of ram on craigslist for 100 bucks! Very good price for that board and the ram. The board has an 1155 socket, so it takes the second gen. intel cup's. I went on ebay and found a used intel i5-2500k cpu for $150, which is also a pretty good price. The 2500k is a quad core 3.3ghz overclockable cpu, a big upgrade from my current 2ghz core 2 duo! I picked up a 700w power supply from ebay for 40 bucks which is pretty good. The video card is a Geforce 9800GT with 512mb of ram, which is plenty of video power for what I need. As for hard drives, I have a 320gb drive for osx, a 250gb drive for linux, a 250gb drive for windows, and when drive prices come down, I will get a 1tb drive for media/data accessible to all of the os's. I might eventually upgrade the OSX drive to solid state in the future. 

Heres all the guts on the table running successfully running 10.6! The computer is very fast. when I'm done, it will be quad-booting 10.6, 10.7, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows 7.

I wanted to go with a steampunk style case. Of course, there isn't really any commercial cases that are very cool in my opinion, plus I'm broke s usual, so this is a budget build. Therefore, the only option is to build my own case. It will be built out of wood, with metal accents. I plan on over clocking this computer so I will also build a custom liquid cooling system for it.

The frame is oak, the wood slats are made from mahogany plywood I ripped into 2" sections.

The frame is much stronger that your average computer case. Its pretty much built like a piece of furniture, so it can easily hold a person or three.

You can see the cable management area on the side. All the cables will be hidden back there, so the inside will be nice and clean looking.

The edges will be banded with steel angle iron.

I will probably end up using an old heater core for the radiator. I wanted to build a radiator from scratch, but copper is expensive, so ill just have to buy one instead.

The cables are all hidden back behind the right side piece.

There will be an exposed liquid cooling reservoir on the front. I might even put some nixie tubes or something on it for added awesomeness. 

 

Some random sketches of what to put on the front.

I welded the pieces of angle iron together and ground the edges so it looks like one piece.

My welder wasn't feeding right, so the welds are a bit rough, I will redo them later. Ugh... another thing to fix...

That looks pretty sweet, if I don't say so myself.

I bought this brass heater core of eBay. Heater cores generally perform better than actual pc liquid cooling radiators because they have a higher fin density, plus they're way cheaper.

I cut holes for two 120mm fans that will blow air through the radiator.

I made a shroud out of some really thin brass, but it looks kinda crappy. I think I will just end up making a nice wood shroud.

I got the cool claw feet mounted.

As you can see, there's screw missing. I still need to pick up some better ones for the feet.

Here it is in some different lighting.

The hard drives will be screwed to these two pieces of aluminium, which in turn will be bolted to the bottom of the case.

Just bought some copper and some brass fittings to start work on the liquid cooling.

Here's the water reservoir. Just a piece of copper tubing with plexiglass at each end. There will be a round porthole on the front of the case and the reservoir will be mounted behind it. The water will glow from the lights in the case.

I soldered a copper pipe to the top of the res. The tube will act as a fill port and will stick out the top of the case with a cool screw on brass cap.

I made some cool cutouts on the front of the case. There will be some brass mesh behind it along with a fan that will blow onto the hard drives.

This pipe will be mounted on the front of the case.

I JB welded the ends onto the reservoir. It looks like crap so I will end up making a new one later. 

Its hard to get stuff done now that I have a job and work everyday along with school.