-- PCMods
Fan Grills
-- Price: $17.95
USD
-- 6.27.2001
-- By: GideonX
-- Page: 1
One of the most common case mods that are done are blow
holes. Usually this is done by cutting a hole and slapping
a fan grill on top of it. Most common grills are the ones that
wire around in circles like the one seen in our blow hole guide:
These are getting a little too used by
too many people so the fine folks at PCMods.com
decided to change it up. We received a nice package from Nick
at Crazy PC
with some new items he acquired in his shop, newly styled fan
grills!
Alright, you're probably thinking what
the hell are wrong these people at GT. Don't they have better
things to do than review simple pieces of metal? Yea, we
probably do but these things look rather swank so we thought heck,
why not show them off.
To start off, we had to cut up some
holes to put these grills on. The ones we received are the
80mm variety. They come in other sizes including 92 and 120mm.
Before we provide you with some pics of what they look like on a
case, we are going to create some holes for them to sit in.
We're going to be checking out the
atomic and the biohazard design today. Both machine cut and
sturdy as can be. I used to be able to bend the regular wire
grills a little to straighten them out when they are bent, but these
are solid and rather hard to bend. No need really since these
came in flat and even.
What we first did was assemble our
tools. What is needed includes the following:
-
Drill w/ drill bits
-
Dremel
-
Pencil
-
Masking tape
-
Ruler
Our first step was to pencil in the
exact area we will be drilling and cutting. The grill is a
perfect template to do the work on (hard to see the pencil lines
here):
Once the outline is complete, take some
masking tape and go around the area we penciled in to prevent any
sudden jerk scratches by the machinery when drilling or cutting.
Now to find out the exact size of the
drill bits we will need. If you have bits that have size
labels, you will need the 3/16 sized bit. If you don't have
them labeled, you can always just take it and stick it through and
test the size.
For our drilling, we will be using the
DeWalt 5.4amp corded drill. This thing has silly strong power.
The bits we used are created with small
pilot points. So slippage on the first strike on the surface
is non-existent. You can create your own pilot point to make
it easier to drill by just taking a small screw driver and pushing a
small wedge in the holes. After about 1 minutes, we had our
four holes done.
Our next step will be to get that pesky
circle out of the way. A blow hole would be quite useless if
it were there, so we switched out the drill for our Dremel
Multi-Pro. About 10-15 minutes later, we had our blow hole
done for our smashing new grills!
Here is our finished result. A
nice clean look, goes real well if you have a silver or black case.
As you can see from that handle, this
will be sitting in our LAN Box : ) Which reminds me, the
second part of that should be online this week! Thanks for
sitting through our shortest review yet, let us know if you like
these grills. You can pick them up from Crazy
PC!
Pros:
Cons:
Discuss this in our Forums!
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