Izerion

Just in time, 1 day before campzone, I finished the flightcase and the server. I added felt to the inside of the doors, and it looks really nice.

Then I put in the server and the storage, I also used an APC rack pdu to add a timer to the outlets. The server-outlet has to wait 60 seconds before turning on to allow the storage to boot properly.

And the outside is finished, yesterday I’ve been working on adding the handles, butterfly locks and wheels. Especially the locks required some precision but now both door’s can be attached to both sides. First the handles:

The hole cut out and the rivet holes drilled.

One side finished

After I finished the handles on the other side, I decided to add the wheels. I first made 2 extra pieces of wood to attach the wheels to. This helps spread the weight.

Then it was time to add the butterfly locks.

To make sure the doors fit in every possible way on both sides, I first made one lock, and made sure it was exactly in the middle. Then I turned the door around and added the parts of the second lock on both sides. Now the door fits in both ways on this side. Then I took the second door, and added the locks there, so it would fit on this same side. The last step was to turn the flightcase around and add the last 2 parts of the locks to the other side, making sure both doors fit on that side as well.

The case itself is finished now. I only have to add the rack profiles and some foam to the inside of the doors.

I’ve had a really busy weekend and made a lot of progress with the flightcase. On saturday I started at 5pm and when I got out of the basement to get a drink, it was already 11pm, I was surprised it was already dark outside. After the drink, I got back into the basement and worked until 4am.

The first step was cutting and attaching the edge lining.

This is the perfect time to try out my new pneumatic riveter

The edge lining on the tunnel is finished.

Now it’s really starting to look like a flightcase.

Next step, attaching the edge lining to the doors, this includes the ball-corners

And here is the first finished door.

With the box glued together, it is time for the next step: taking the top and bottom off again. And yes, this really is the best way to do this. By making a closed box first, you ensure that the box is correct and the corners and everything is aligned. The doors are going to be 7 cm deep, but the closing extrusions will also add about 1 cm to the door.

And here is the first side done.

After taking off both sides I started making the closing extrusions. I chose to use reversible extrusions because you waste less and you can use the same on both sides which is better because I have to think less when making them.

After a lot of cutting (8 frames per side) the doors were finished.

To be honest, the project costs a LOT more time than I expected, but it’s worth it.

After 2 weeks of waiting, the parts finally arrived.

Since the pre-laminated wood is very hard and it has to fit perfectly, I didn’t want to cut it myself. I asked a friend of mine who has a table saw and he wanted to cut it so that was covered. While I was waiting I decided to cut the rack frames. 8U high.

A week later I got the wood back, all the pieces cut nicely.

Now that all the parts were ready, I couldn’t wait to start assembling the box. First I glued and nailed the 4 sides together to create the tunnel.

Then the top and the bottom lids.

And then, I had to wait again…. Actually most of the time spent until now has been waiting..

To protect my new music server when moving it around, taking it to LAN’s and keeping everything together in one place, I decided to get a real flightcase. I first went looking for pre-built flightcases but they were either the wrong size, or way too expensive. The plan to build my own custom flightcase was born.

After some googling for flightcase parts I found a belgian webshop which is specialised in flightcase parts for custom-built cases. Now that I found all the available parts, and the sizes of everything I started calculating what size the case should be. I decided to make an 8U high case, the server and storage are 6U together so that would leave 2U for a switch and a power bar. After a lot of calculating and measuring, I drew the flightcase in SketchUp.

I didn’t draw all the parts (mostly the corners and the locks) but they will be there when it’s finished. Now that I got all the sizes I made a template for the most efficient way to cut all the parts while wasting almost no wood.

Now that the plans were ready, it was time to make a shopping list.

After placing the order, the waiting started :)

The first article for my blog. I know i’m a bit late to this party but whatever, this blog is mostly for the people I know, so they can follow what i’m doing.

Last week I got the new hardware for my new music server. The old one was getting cpu overheat errors and the disks were getting full. I also didn’t feel like upgrading because I wanted to move to rack-mounted equipment (for the coolness factor) and more redundancy. Redundancy is probably the most important reason for this project, I’ve literally put weeks (maybe months) of work in my collection to get all the tags right, no doubles, etc., etc.. One of the other important points to look at was disk-space, but I think I got that one covered right now.

The first step in this project, getting server-grade hardware at a consumer-grade price, was probably the hardest, or so I thought. After asking around for second-hand hardware I didn’t really get any satisfying result. I could get some empty 4U rackmount cases, but they didn’t have a hot-swappable SCSI or SATA backplane. Besides that, 4U is just too much. Anything you can fit in 4U, you can also fit in a 2U case.

After a lot of thinking, searching Ebay, thinking, searching Ebay, I decided to contact the company which also supplies my work equipment and asked them if they could build anything for a nice price for a private project. They were willing to help and got me a nice Supermicro 6025B-8B. It’s equiped with 1 Intel Xeon 5060 Dempsey 3.2GHz, 4GB Apacer FFB Memory and 6 Seagate Cheetah 10K.7 73GB harddisks.

The server part was now taken care of. Next was the storage. I knew we had an unused EasyRAID S16 at work. This is a 16 disk storage cabinet for SATA disks. It supports hardware raid 0 to 50 and connects to the server using SCSI. After asking what the plans were, I could take it. Not that hard after all.

Expect some more blogging soon as I’m going to put this all into one big flightcase.