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.

New Needle!

Vinyl, according to most audiophiles and me, is the king of formats when it comes to fidelity. Last summer I picked up a nice Thorens turntable at a garage sale for free. It had a nice Ortofon ff15xe needle that sounded fantastic. I put a nice clean record on and it was probably the best quality audio I have ever heard. But, what I didn't know was that the turntable wasn't working quite right and I didn't notice that the tonearm didn't lift at the end of the record, so I went to flip the record and pushed the tonearm back not knowing the needle wasn't lifted and SCRATCH!!! I wrecked a perfectly good needle... I was pretty depressed for a while. I looked to see how much a new needle was and it was like 60 bucks. For me, thats a lot of money. I have since fixed the turntable, but it still doesn't sound that great with the crappy needle.

  Just the other day I looked at needles again and realized the place I was looking at before was selling the needle AND cartridge. I didn't need the cartridge, just the needle, which I found was only 15 bucks. I bought one and installed it and couldn't be happier!

Spinning a clean copy of Zoso.

Ipod flash conversion

I recently acquired an iPod mini from someone I know. I really like the old iPods with monochrome screens, and I like the click-wheels more for some reason. Another think I like about the old ones is that they are MUSIC players. They are simple, no apps, no other crap, just music.

  So anyway, The iPod mini has a tiny 4gb hard drive that is hardly adequate for my 90+gb music library. The ipod minis have a "microdrive" which is a tiny hard drive in a compact flash card casing. This is great because I can just buy a higher capacity CF card and pop it in. The advantage of an actual CF card over the microdrive is the fact that it is solid state, which means its less fragile, faster and uses less juice. So I went ahead and bought a 16gb CF card and installed it. I wanted a bigger one but they start to get pretty pricy past 32 gigs.

the 16gb CF card

Ipod mini disassembled. You can see the microdrive on the bottom right, its exactly the same size as a CF card.

CF card installed.

After you plug in the CF card, just go to iTunes and reformat the ipod and thats it! This can work for a few other iPods too. A long time ago I did it with a 4th gen with the use of an adapter.

Circuit Board Etching

Etching circuit boards for my modular synth turned out to be kind of a problem. I was originally using the "toner transfer" method. The way it works, is you print the circuit out on a piece of magazine paper with a laser jet printer and iron it on to the bland piece of copper clad. The toner from the printer is basically plastic, so it melts to the copper and will not be etched away by the etching chemical (ferric chloride). The main problem with this is that the ink doesn't always transfer all the way and you have to touch up most of the traces with a sharpie. After that, you try and etch the thing and most of the sharpie and some of the ink wear off and then you get a mostly blank board! I was getting sick of crappy looking boards (and spending hours making ONE), so I decided to try something else. I got this stuff called "Press-n-Peel." Its plastic with this blue stuff on it. You print on it with a laser jet and iron it on, just like the toner transfer method, except this works way better!

Yay, a board that doesn't look like crap!

Blacksmithing

One day I got the crazy idea of making my own knives. I used to sorta collect knives, but I never had any very good quality ones. I knew I could probably make a better knife than the average crappy store bought stainless knife.

Most knives are made of 440 stainless steel. Stainless steel has its place. For instance, it's good for low maintenance non rusting blades, but generally, high carbon steel blades are superior. Steel is an alloy of iron with a small amount of carbon added (.2%-2.1%) I believe. The carbon is what makes the steel hard, so steels with a higher carbon content are harder and will hold an edge longer.

The first step for me was to build a forge. I built a makeshift one in about an hour out of an old car wheel.

A basic forge consists of a firepot to hold the fuel, and some type of blower to force air through a tuyere under the coals. 

                                          http://www.mooseforge.com/forges.html

I just used a blow-dryer as a forge blower and it moves plenty of air. The first time I tried the forge I just used some leftover charcoal from a campfire and some raw wood. even with the raw wood it worked ok, but not what you would want to do unless you had to. 

The next part was making actual charcoal. Some people use coal which is good for most blacksmithing applications, but the one time I used coal, it smelled very strong, made tons of smoke, and didnt burn very hot. Plus, I didn't know of any place to purchase coal. I need to be able to reach welding temps in my forge so I decided to go with charcoal.  Charcoal, is a bit better for knife-making because it burns hot, has almost no smoke, has little ash, and can actually put some carbon  into the steel. It also burns much hotter so its easier to reach welding temps. The process for making charcoal is fairly simple and there are a few ways of doing it. You take a bunch of scrap wood, put it in a sealed metal container with a small vent, and then cook it over a fire for a few hours. The wood heats up and all water and most of the wood is burned away without actually catching fire because there is no oxygen inside the container. After a few hours your left with charcoal. The hard part is knowing when its done. The idea is that the heat will cook away all the impurities in the wood leaving almost pure carbon, but won't let the wood catch fire because there is no oxygen in the container. I got an old smoker from my friend. It had a door that opens but was open at the bottom. I just put some sheet metal over the bottom of the smoker to seal it up. 

I tried it out and this is what it looked like. All of the smoke coming out of the container is wood gas, which is flammable and can be fed back into the fire to decrease the amount of wood needed to heat and increase the efficiency of the charcoal production. It worked and I was left with some pretty nice charcoal. 

Knives!

As I talked about earlier, high carbon steel is great for knives. Some places you can find it are old tools, leaf springs, certain automotive scraps, and things like that. 

After I built the forge, I wanted to try it, so I took a piece of high carbon steel that I got from the metals shop at school and started hammering. I am not sure exactly what type of steel it is but I know its tool steel of some sort.

I used an old piece of railroad track as an anvil.

The shape was pretty random, I just started hammering. 

Heres what the knife looked like after a bit of grinding and shaping.

Next it was time for a handle. I cut a few pieces of wood and leather and layered and glued them on the tang. After that I shaped the handle and was left with this.

This knife was fun to make, but I don't think I really like it that much haha. It was more just experimentation.

Knife No.2

I started making another knife, this time out of an old file. 

(ignore the sketches in the background)

I used a round file to do some decorative work on the top.

this one has copper in the handle.

The sheath was made by cutting a piece of redwood in half, then hollowing out the insides to the shape of the knife, then gluing them back together. 

This one is a little better than the other one but still rushed.

Knife No.3

This knife is also made from an old file.

This knife has a scandi grind bevel. It makes it nice and easy to get a razor sharp edge.  Its pretty much the common bushcraft style you see. It still needs a bit of shaping in this picture.

 Did some more file work on this one, more of a vine pattern.

This knife isn't finished yet.

Back to the charcoal making. I still was not completely happy with the container I was using. It was too small to really get a good batch of charcoal, plus it had too many holes and too much oxygen could get inside. It also was a pain to use because of the door. The second time I tried it at my friends house, it fell of the log stands and the door opened and all the charcoal burned up! So, I started looking for a 50 gallon steel drum to make a better charcoal barrel, or whatever you want to call it. I found a 50 gallon drum with a removable lid and vent already on it. 

I tried it and cooked the wood for something like 6 hours till it stopped smoking. After it cooled, I opened it up and it was only half cooked! So, I cooked it for another 6 hours and opened it and it was still not cooked! I think the problem is that the vent tube is too small and it gets clogged up with tar and doesn't let any gas escape. So I'll have to put a bigger vent on it.

Forge No.2

The first forge was just temporary, and well, it sucked. The fire pot was too deep, so it was hard to heat up longer pieces evenly. I plan on making some swords, so I needed a longer forge. I decided to build a ground forge that resembles a japanese forge. It is open on both ends so a long piece can be put in one end can stick out the other. 

Not the best picture, but you get the idea. You can see the blow dryer feeds into a tube that goes underground and leads to the forge. This forge worked great! It gets super hot, I melted a bit of steel in it, so yeah, it gets hot. It will be great for making Damascus billets. 

Heres some random night pictures.

Knife sharpening and polishing.

To polish my blades I was just using high grit sandpaper, which works but you get uneven cuts and not very crisp edges. I was inspired by the japanese bladesmith's techniques, and there method of polishing and sharpening blades is using water stones. Japanese water stones are great because they wear away as you use them, so you get a very nice even cut. I bought some and they're great!