Project A.R.E.S. (Astral Robot Enclosure Systems) tells a story:
Starship Copper Nebula, named so for its peculiar color, is tapped for space program A.R.E.S. The starship comes in contact with some sort of organic alien technology, which starts to merge with it, covering the external structure and contaminating the propellant.
This story continues through colors and lines, from the blue and copper shades and curved lines representing alien technology, to the aluminum and silver shades and straight lines embodying human technology. Three astronauts at the back, impersonated by the hex-shaped reservoirs, look into the void while trying to communicate with the alien being. Up front is a mirror, which reflects Copper Nebula’s destination
Eventually, the humans and aliens succeed in communicating and join each other in a common cause: survival.
When I built Project A.R.E.S. for the latest Cooler Master Case Mod World Series. My goal was to take the Cooler Master Cosmos C700M, (which we list in our Best PC Cases list) and re-think it from the ground up, following this sci-fi design language. My biggest inspiration -- mainly for the mod’s color scheme and the starry face at the front of the case -- came from Robot in Netflix’s Lost in Space show.
The finished product took about six months and ultimately won Best Tower of the Year in Cooler Master’s contest, is usually what matters most. But I take a lot of pride in how I actually accomplish this kind of work and in inspiring people to start pushing boundaries. By detailing the making of Project A.R.E.S., I hope to do just that. Let’s get started!
Case and Components
Here are the PC components I recruited for Project A.R.E.S.:
As mentioned, the base of this project is the Cooler Master’s Cosmos C700M. You’re seeing two of those because I actually replaced the bottom panel of one with a second top panel (taken from the second case), for symmetry purposes.
The first step in making such an intricate mod is tearing the case apart, particularly the internals, which will be completely reworked. After that, I flipped the case 90 degrees in order to have the handle bars at both the front and back instead of at the top and bottom, where they were originally.
The C700M case has an amazing feature that helped a lot with these extreme modifications: threaded holes on all sides of the frame. This allows you to easily mount any kind of custom panel or bracket.
Next, I took some aluminum L-profiles and cut them to length to fit all around the case’s frame. This made it easier to add internal panels to close up all sides.
Custom Back Panel
Since the internals were still in the design phase at this point, I proceeded to cut the first custom panel for A.R.E.S., the back panel. I used 5mm acrylic, cut and engraved on my CNC router. The peculiar shape created a challenge, as I had a lot of curved corners and, simply, weird angles to replicate. To tackle this, I first cut an MDF (medium density fiberboard) prototype to trace down the measurements and ensure their accuracy.
After that, I went to cut the real thing.
Due to the unique shape of the C700M, I had to bend the back panel’s top and bottom using a heat gun. For accuracy, I used the original panels from the C700M as a template.
You might be wondering about the three circles in the panel. Those are there to show off the Bitspower Water Tank Hexagon reservoirs and to provide a sort of space helmet look. Ultimately, I used ornaments to complete the look.
Going back to the internals, I cut the two top and bottom grills out of 5mm acrylic to allow airflow to the pair of 360mm radiators and fans. I tried to keep Project A.R.E.S.’ insides as clean as possible to let enough air through. The final design is basically open-air though, and there are other entry points for air as well, so it wasn’t a big issue to begin with.
Rotating Hardware Panel
One of the most eye-popping features of Project A.R.E.S. is undoubtedly the rotating system for its main components. Below is an early 3D concept:
The central design was so difficult to work out, and I went through tens of attempts before landing on one that actually worked. I eventually made the rotating hardware panel’s side wall and rotating bracket out of 5mm aluminum.
To fix the central acrylic panel, I made four brackets out of 8mm aluminum and screwed them onto the two rotating discs.
Next, I added a small pocket to the side walls, so I could insert two small ball bearings.
This is how it looks without the central piece:
The Floating Effect
On to more aluminum milling. I started making the base and pedestal so that I could start having a clearer look on the final shape of the whole thing.
First was the 8mm aluminum panel, which attached to the bottom of the case, thanks to two other strips that I cut, drilled and threaded.
In order for the pedestal to give Project A.R.E.S. the illusion that it’s floating I called in three 40 x 40mm acrylic blocks. But to avoid having to drill holes in them and ruin the magic, I made six acrylic discs that I glued to the blocks and had them serve as mounting holes.
The main part of the pedestal is made out of 15mm acrylic. The trickiest part about constructing this piece was definitely creating the huge chamfered edges. I was able to create the look by using a tridimensional toolpath on the CNC router.
Since my machine isn’t very sturdy, it tends to chutter and leave undesirable finishes on the surface. So I took my orbital sander and got to work with some elbow grease to finish up that big chamfer.
I left a frosted finish so that the edges could catch some light coming from the central LED strip.
Since I didn’t really trust the acrylic to hold all the weight, I added a 5mm aluminum plate under it and a small channel to route the cable from the RGB strip to the back of the pedestal.
At this stage, here’s what Project A.R.E.S. looked like:
Time to get to work on the hardware mountings.
First I made an MDF prototype of the motherboard/GPU tray, which will be a separate part from the central acrylic piece for easier maintenance and setup.
The prototype allowed me to fix a couple issues with my design. Then, I proceeded to cut the three pieces out of 5mm aluminum.
I fixed the GPU brackets to the motherboard tray by drilling threaded holes on the edges with a drill press. Here, the focus was keeping things standard, so that hardware could be easily upgraded if needed. This ste[ isn’t as obvious as it may seem. Many extreme PC modding projects feature custom mountings because they’re easier to implement. But those custom mountings are, naturally, tailored to the specific components used for that mod, making upgrades really difficult without further custom work.
Picky PSU Placement
Finding a placement for the power supply , even if it’s one of the best power supplies, is always a big issue for me because, to be honest, no one wants to look at a plain metal box. PSUs also take up a lot of space, so it’s hard to find the right place for one in a custom mod. When it comes to Project A.R.E.S., the rotating hardware panel makes this even more complicated because all cable management has to go on the actual rotating part.
I eventually decided to make custom mountings and covers to fix the PSU to the back of the rotating panel and add cable channels to the acrylic. Below are the 3D models (the shape of the channels changed in the final product).
I made “armor” for the PSU using 5mm acrylic (front, top, bottom sides), 8mm aluminum (left and right, with threaded holes on all the edges to fix the other plates) and 5mm aluminum (for the back plate that was also used to fix everything to the rotating panel).
I then cut an MDF prototype of the central acrylic panel to trace down the placement for the tubing pass-through holes. I played with a couple of ideas regarding the way to route the tubing, which was parallel and kind of X-shaped. Eventually, I ran with parallel runs, which always look super nice.
Chugging Along
Quick backtrack to the rotating hardware panel. At this point, I looked to mount this central piece and make sure it’d work as planned.
I took the 8mm brackets I cut previously and drilled M5 holes on the edges to mount them to the rotating discs.
Moving onto some external work, I incorporated the same design style used for the custom back panel into the top and front ones as well.
These were also bent, using heat on both sides. In the picture below, you see the panel being bent and the clamps holding it in place while it cools down.
I individually constructed the Cooler Master logo seen on the front of the case in the picture below and put it on top of the case’s original power button so the button could have some more pizazz. I also did this for the front controls for fan speed and RGB lighting.
Starting the Side Panels
Using 15mm acrylic, I constructed the large ellipse at the front of A.R.E.S., and added a big fillet, which features rounded edges, to make it fit into the overall design scheme seamlessly. To do this, I leveraged the same 3D toolpath technique used in creating the pedestal, which meant clearing it up with a flat end mill and making it smooth with a ball end mill.
Again, my machine is a joke when it comes to good finishes, so I went ahead and made the fillet really smooth by hand.
And this is how it will fit inside the front.
After having checked all measurements for the central acrylic panel, I dove into three hours of straight milling to get this piece done. There were a lot of processes involved in building Project A.R.E.S., but the longest one was definitely milling all of these 10mm deep channels for cable routing.
Then I threaded all the required holes in M4 and M5, as well as the G1/4” threads for the pass-throughs. I didn’t use regular pass-through fittings due to clearance issues, (and the solution I went with looks cleaner anyway).
Meanwhile, I finished designing the side frames of the case, featuring the side “portals” and edge lighting all around. The assembly of each side required five different parts total.
The first part I made was the 2mm aluminum frames with part of the rings.
A trickier part was making what would go under these 2mm panels, the 10mm acrylic frames. Those required a channel to be milled, allowing me to route the LED strips inside.
To avoid losing my mind with double-sided operations on the machine, I drilled counterbores on the other side to have the screws sit flush.
The mounting holes are dedicated to both the acrylic and aluminum frames, so the aluminum one can be easily removed by itself if necessary. This is particularly helpful when doing maintenance to the internal hardware, since the rings do take up some clearance. During maintenance you can keep the acrylic frame on and avoid having to deal with the LED cables.
For some aesthetic flair, I incorporated rings into the side panels using 5mm acrylic. I also included my logo In the surrounding rectangle, which I milled down to a thickness of 3mm and polished.
I had to make custom mountings for the top 360mm radiator and clearly overdid it with a chonky 5mm aluminum plate.
This right here took a few attempts. I wanted to make some kind of custom fittings to fix the corrugated pipes that would help route the cables from the rotating system to the inner areas of the case. The thing is my machine was acting up and ruined a couple attempts to cut these. I eventually managed to get them right and did a quick test fit.
Starry Night Side Panel
Here comes a more artistic part. The front ellipse you saw earlier was meant to offer a clear view on a starry night kind of effect. To accomplish this, my main actors were optic fibers and epoxy resin. The process required me to prep a clear mold so that I could keep track of what was happening during epoxy pouring and curing. I had to drill more than 100 holes into the top panel in order to fit the optic fibers through and keep them in place while the epoxy was curing.
The resin pour I made used black dye as well as light blue and copper mica powders. The light blue was eventually covered up by the other two but copper actually shows up at some angles creating a very nice nebula effect.
The thick-pour epoxy required about a week for a full cure. In the meantime, I made a modification to the C700M’s handles, which just didn’t cut it for me in terms of looks. Again, I wanted some kind of floaty look, so I decided to cut off the case’s mounting braces and replace them with my own custom mountings.
Since this is cast aluminum, there were a few hollow spots after cutting the braces off, so I filled them up with body filler.
I did the same to the plastic panels in the spots where the braces originally were.
I drilled new holes at the top and bottom of both plastic panels and handles and added small, 9mm aluminum spacers to mount the handles directly to the plastic panels.
This obviously made it much cleaner looking, while sacrificing the use of these handles as actual handles, since they no longer mount to the case frame.
Here’s a before and after shot and some eye candy of the overall look so far.
I also used body filler to fuse the two plastic pieces that go in the center of back and front panels.
After this, the epoxy for the starry night side panel was done curing and delivered the below result.
I quickly realized that if I painted the back black instead, the lighting effect would be much more visible.
Now, it was finally time to get the paint job started. I began from the external panels and went through a couple attempts before I got a color I liked, so I wasn’t starting off very optimistic. The biggest obstacles were in trying not to overdo it with the blue or make the paint clunky.
Thankfully, I was able to break up some of this blue with copper paint, starting from the C700M’s trims that normally have RGB lighting in the C700M. I decided to paint them in copper and remove the lighting to fit the overall design much better. The handles also got the copper treatment.
The more I painted, the more confident I got with my choice of colors. Project A.R.E.S. was starting to really come together as a beautiful piece.
The side frames got the same blue treatment, and I finally added the edge lighting strips behind them.
As I mentioned in my story at the beginning of this article, there are two color schemes Project A.R.E.S. represents. I wanted the inside of the mod to be painted and finished differently from the outside.
So I took the acrylic parts and painted them with a titanium color.
Pump Mounting
At this point, I took a break from the paint job to tackle a part that was long overdue: the pump mounting. I wanted the pump to look like the thruster of the starship, so I made simple brackets out of aluminum L-profiles and then modified the pump to make the cable come out of the side, instead of the bottom, of the pump for a much cleaner look.
Finishing off the Internals
The internal aluminum panels were finished by initially brushing them and then making random strokes using abrasive discs mounted onto the power drill.
Final assembly of the internals started by putting together the acrylic panel and all the parts of the rotating hardware panel.
Blue LED strips embedded into the acrylic panel help things pop.
With this done, it was time to finish the PSU side. I painted the acrylic covers with the same titanium color used before and added some details using a copper-colored acrylic marker.
Finally, the PSU is mounted:
Cable Management
Now it’s time for the fun part: cable management! This was quite complicated because there just isn’t a lot of space here. I was definitely happy with how the corrugated pipes acted here though. They were both very useful and fit with my theme.
The pedestal was completed as well by painting the lower aluminum plate blue and adding a couple copper details with the aforementioned marker.
Next, I fixed everything together, including the acrylic blocks.
Coming Together
With cable management done, it was time to assemble the main hardware and ,with that, the internal tubing runs and last touches on the internal cables.
This is how the “dark side” looks with the cables through the rotating system. They will be fixed in place later on.
While I kept painting all the remaining parts, I kept on with cable management too, since at this point I was in a crunch time until the Case Mod World Series’ deadline (today, I’m definitely glad I worked my butt off to finish it in time).
Almost everything was now assembled except for the external panels, which still had to be painted. But in the meantime I went ahead and filled the watercooling loop. I intentionally left long soft tubing runs behind the reservoirs so that I was able to remove the panel holding them to access the internals when needed.
Here comes my favorite part of this project: the finished front. I painted all the parts, filled the engravings with the copper marker and installed the backlighting for the optic fibers.
Project A.R.E.S. Complete
My mind was already pretty blown when I saw how good Project A.R.E.S. looked assembled. But then I turned the backlighting on, my brain officially melted. I created the vision I had in my mind, but the end result was even better than I pictured.
After recovering from a quick brain melting, I painted the top panel and added warm-white LED strips to the reservoirs area.
With this final touch, A.R.E.S. was finally complete and ready to take the win at this year’s Cooler Master World Series as Best Tower of the Year.
Final photos:
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March 28, 2021 at 07:00PM
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Building Project A.R.E.S: My Award-Winning Sci-Fi Case Mod - Tom's Hardware
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