Skunkworks Revival - Part 1

The indecisiveness of the creator is palpable as they weigh their options for the exterior shell of their case build.

I'm going to make this decision now and it's going to stick with me, I guess. The exterior patina is really important to me and I want to leave it on the gunmetal color because it was the first gunmetal case that they had made and then the scratches that it has received over the years is just character. But then again, painting on a textured surface can be a challenge because what will happen is the paint can build up in the texture in certain areas and not others, so then you'll get smooth shiny areas and then dull areas.

So I painted the inside black with sem trim paint, which was always a challenge to do. The paint takes time to dry and it's easy to mess up. But once it's done, it looks great. However, painting on something textured is always tricky because what will happen is the paint can build up in the texture in certain areas and not others, so then you'll get smooth shiny areas and then dull areas.

I did my best with trying to build it up slowly and using scotchbrite to break down the high areas. Then I used a microfiber cloth to sort of not buff but sort of smooth it out. But the mid panel is a problem because it has that silver paint on there which I decided I didn't like, so that's filling in the textures.

If it doesn't work, I'm just going to use aircraft remover to strip the paint off and repaint that piece. It'll be fine. The nice thing is I can reassemble the case right now and take that out independently of the case being together, so starting to reassemble now will not be a problem.

I've decided to go ahead and leave the gunmetal on the exterior scratches and all. Phil agrees with me that the factory gunmetal should stay because it was the first gunmetal case that they had made and then the scratches that it has received over the years is just character. So I'm going to put it back together.

I think using aircraft remover can be a bit tricky, though, because it doesn't take off anodizing, which is just dying the metal, but powder coat is still a paint and so it won't work on that either. That's why I might have to use some other method to get rid of the paint.

Now let's show you how the case sort of looks. You can see that the gunmetal and black look great together. However, the mid panel is not in here right now because it was a problem with the texture on that piece.

It's kind of hard to get big areas like this to be uniform especially when they're textured, but I think it's going to look pretty good even by leaving the gunmetal color the way that it is. I'm happy with the way this is turning out, but I know some people might disagree.

One thing I'm thinking about for the build is using different colors for each component. The loop 520 red and maybe even 360 on the front dedicated to just the GPU with its own Loop and then on the CPU it would have the 480 at the top for the CPU which is plenty, so maybe even a 120 in the back for the front of it but that's as far as we're going to get today.

I'm okay with not getting the whole thing because sometimes you may not get everything, and that's kind of fun. We got something, so I'm happy with the way this is turning out. And yeah, this is going to turn into a full build and I'm really looking forward to it.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwell uh the nice thing about toober Fest is it means I get to make more videos in the month which means I can take you guys along for the ride on stuff I may not normally make a video about today I'm going to undertake trying to recondition and repaint my sma8 the allnew IQ link ecosystem for Corsair finally removes all the cable clutter from your PC IQ link components synchronize RGB lighting and settings between connected devices with a single wire creating a chain of devices on a single port via the link Hub take control of your system and ditch the Clutter by following the sponsored Link in the description below so this is my Cas laabs sma8 it looks like a filing cabinet or console TV very old school but it was always like the staple centerpiece of my channel and more recently I talked about the fact that I wanted to do like a diarama in this I've backed off from that idea for a couple reasons one I'm full of very ambitious ideas that sometimes are just bigger than what I can do and what what I mean by that is like the amount of time that a small team like myself and our team is able to create let alone taking the time to build the models these days is very difficult for me so what I'm going to do is I'm going to revive this build as my personal rig I'm going to retire the in 925 for a multitude of reasons one the 925 does not have any sort of ventilation on the front or on the top it tends to recirculate hot air through the radiator which isn't which has kind of been okay it's been fine until I put a 4090 in there with over 500 watts of power draw and I'll see hotspot temps reach 7275 C on the graphics card and for me that is just ridiculously hot for a water cooled card when the air coolers are capable of doing the same type of job so as you can see this thing is nasty it is gross and it has been sitting out here getting dust all over it and it's just been bad but it has been through so many different iterations in the channel so I want to bring this back and although I do not record record in my home office anymore which is how you guys always saw it in the background of my videos because my home office was also my studio um I just kind of want to bring the Nostalgia back the other thing is I find it Bittersweet that thermal take is currently being sued for a multitude of reasons one of which being copycatting and if you guys don't recall one of the reasons why case laabs went out of business is because of the fact that they were more or less copied by thermal take and then bullied into submission by their lawyers uh about being vocal about the fact that their designs were copied although the blame still falls on on case labs for not having any sort of patents or trademarks or anything on any of their designs so if you have IP or intellectual property protect it that said um what we're going to do today is I'm going to tear down some of it I don't think I need to do a full tear down I mostly because I will probably never remember how it goes back together things go into a very specific order of operations to get like the mid panel and all that installed but there's some things I'm going to have to take off like the hinges and the snaps right here this one's all bent okay fortunately I have spares you can see each panel has like these threaded Nubs on there that kind of snap onto those like for instance this guy right here would just go and that's how they attach right it's very industrial this will allow me to have a lot of fun with the space there's been a lot of aftermarket stuff developed for this case um since I did my builds like there's mid mid distrib mid plate illumination plates there's distro plates all kinds of stuff that we can use uh to make the build more interesting plus it will allow me to do a dual loop again I can have a 560 rad on the bottom I can have a 360 rad on the front I can have a 480 rad on the top and I can have all those in there at the same time which so many cases will be like oh you can do this rad and this rad and this Rad but so many of them you can't do them all at the same time the volume of this thing is so ridiculous that yes you can do it all at the same time time with this I think I've I've sat here looking at it enough to where I'm just tired of seeing it in this state to give you an idea of how long it's been since I've used it and look I mean when the last time we saw these Corsair fans with the little removable rings on them and I remember when it was all super custom because I painted the Rings a different color anyway that said there's a lot of parts I'm going have to get for this I might do a 14th gen build in this I I also might just do the 13th gen 13900 K like golden examples that I have I have like one that I was able to get to over 40,000 pretty easily on an undervolt and then I found out my workstation one that I'm using can go to over 41,600 with a lot of voltage and it doesn't get hot so I guess we'll have to see what 14th gen holds has in store but with that said um I think we'll just go ahead oh I need to talk about what the paint I'm going to use is I'm going to try and add a little bling to this this is the stainless steel the 316 stainless steel paint that is a semi gloss but metallic I want to do a test panel on one of these to see how this looks uh I got to do some tear down we'll kind of do b-roll style and then maybe talk about some various things and uh we'll go from there okay so everything's torn apart and I've now done my test spray here and some overspray got in the front so I guess I'm kind of stuck now anyway this is that metallic silver which looks pretty cool I think um see I'm kind of conflicted cuz part of me wants to maybe spray the internal components like matte black and then silver on the outside but ah this is such a hard decision because the gunmetal like this was the first gunmetal but the thing is it's so scratched it's got scratches everywhere and stuff and I guess this would be like a patina build for a car right if you if you leave the patina CU this would have all the character of all the time Skunk Works has been taken apart and worked on and scratches and stuff on there it's part of its character but I feel like this is more of a rebirth if you will I think I need to do a bigger component to see how I feel about this as I'm sort of cleaning this off well there's no doubt it's stuck as you can see I'm using a scotch bright on here and it's not taking the paint off but I'm not happy with its uniformity um it's also very grabby it's probably because of the powder coat like over here it's super grabby it's I think it's something to do with the metallics in the paint or something it's also not very uniform it's probably just because of the the textured surface that's being painted on obviously I feel this kind of thing that needs to be like buffed after um so this is a no-go for me I now need to figure out I think I could just end up using some of the gunmetal paints I've already used however I'm getting a really good indication right now how good paint's going to stick to this textured metal because it is not scratching off as you can see that's good I might still do my black interior gunmetal EX exterior I've I've seen that before I've seen people take two sm8 a black one and a gray one and mix and match Parts um which I don't think looks bad so if I were to just now paint the parts that I want to be black black then that will work so there's that and then this goes right here so that would be everything that needs to be black as far as I can tell um because this is also a two-piece front I guess I could probably also have the frame inside right there be black but the outside be gunmetal still so black black black black I don't know go find a picture Corsair brings gaming to the next level with the Zenon 45in flexible OLED Zenon Flex display with up to 240 HZ refresh rate 0.03 millisecond gred grade response time motion blur cancelling anti-reflective coating burning protection and C customizable Bend based on users preference the Zenon Flex from Corsair allows Gamers to truly tailor their display to their liking click the link below for more details all right so I am going to paint the the internals black I looked I found some a photo of a st10 which is basically an sma8 that had the top compartment as well as the bottom and I like the way it looks so so far these are all the pieces that need to be black all this not the main components cuz basically just the exterior shell now is going to be the gunmetal and um oh and I need to do these two the frames for the radiators on the bottom I am deciding whether or not I want to just leave the external patina I guess I just need to see but um cuz I don't the problem is like the bead blasted texture that's powder coated any paint is going to fill in this texture and then I think it's going to make it uneven and as soon as I paint one panel the exterior color that way I'm screwed unless I'm going to do um aircraft remover to remove the paint which would be fine cuz it won't remove the powder coat um I'm going be kind of stuck so I'm just really conflicted I have a feeling many of the commenters right now are going to be like leave the patina leave the build it's it's a classic let it be like let it show its character and I'm starting to lean that way I honestly am but this is the kind of thing that once you make this decision you're sort of stuck with it and this is also why I guess toober test is kind of fun cuz this is something normally wouldn't do a video about so now you guys are seeing the indecisiveness along the way how's that different from any other day of mine I don't know just I'm intentionally wishy-washy today I guess okay was doing things okay so I painted the inside black as you can see with the sem trim paint it's always a challenge painting on something textured because what will happen is the paint can build up in the texture in certain areas and not others so then you'll get smooth shiny areas and then dull areas so I do the best I can with trying to build it up slowly and then I was use like scotchbrite to break down the high areas then a microfiber cloth to sort of not buff but sort of smooth it out did the best I could the mid panel is a problem though because it has that silver paint on there which I decided I didn't like so that of course is filling in the textures and I'm doing the best I can to try and recreate the texture with the paint if it doesn't work I'm just going to use aircraft remover strip the paint off repaint that piece it'll be fine the nice thing is I can reassemble the case right now and take that out independently of the case being together so starting to reassemble now will not be a problem we decided I'm going to go ahead and leave the gun metal on the exterior scratches and all um I think you guys agree Phil agrees that the the factory gunmetal should stay because it was the first gunmetal case that they had made and then the scratches that it has received over the years is just character so now I'm just going to put it back together gross so I'm an idiot it does take off powder coating it doesn't take off anodizing duh cuz anodizing is just dying the metal but powder coat is still a paint and so anyway um that's what I'm now dealing with gross let's at least show you how the case sort of looks and then I'm going to probably take this home use my pressure washer with the aircraft remover to get it off cuz there's so much pain on this thank God that mid panel is not going to really be used for anything and like covered up with a distri plate or something cuz this is bad there you go so this gives you an idea what the gunmetal and black look like obviously the mid plate is not in here right now yeah it's kind of hard to get such big areas like this to be uniform especially when they're textured but you know uh I think it's going to look pretty good even by leaving the gunmetal color the way that it is I'm happy that I decided to do that um I'm thinking for the loop 520 red and maybe even 360 on the front dedicated to just the GPU with its own Loop and then on the CPU it would have the 480 at the top for the CPU which is plenty so maybe even a 120 in the back for the front of it but that's as far as we're going to get today it's one of the things with toober Fest is sometimes you may not get the whole thing but uh we got something so I'm okay with the way this is turning out not okay with the way that's turning out that's pretty pretty disgusting but that's okay it's not the first time I've ever dealt with having a strip paint off stuff it gets pretty gross until it's done and then it's not that gross so all right guys thanks for watching and as always we'll see you in the next one and yeah this is going to turn into a full build and I'm really looking forward to itwell uh the nice thing about toober Fest is it means I get to make more videos in the month which means I can take you guys along for the ride on stuff I may not normally make a video about today I'm going to undertake trying to recondition and repaint my sma8 the allnew IQ link ecosystem for Corsair finally removes all the cable clutter from your PC IQ link components synchronize RGB lighting and settings between connected devices with a single wire creating a chain of devices on a single port via the link Hub take control of your system and ditch the Clutter by following the sponsored Link in the description below so this is my Cas laabs sma8 it looks like a filing cabinet or console TV very old school but it was always like the staple centerpiece of my channel and more recently I talked about the fact that I wanted to do like a diarama in this I've backed off from that idea for a couple reasons one I'm full of very ambitious ideas that sometimes are just bigger than what I can do and what what I mean by that is like the amount of time that a small team like myself and our team is able to create let alone taking the time to build the models these days is very difficult for me so what I'm going to do is I'm going to revive this build as my personal rig I'm going to retire the in 925 for a multitude of reasons one the 925 does not have any sort of ventilation on the front or on the top it tends to recirculate hot air through the radiator which isn't which has kind of been okay it's been fine until I put a 4090 in there with over 500 watts of power draw and I'll see hotspot temps reach 7275 C on the graphics card and for me that is just ridiculously hot for a water cooled card when the air coolers are capable of doing the same type of job so as you can see this thing is nasty it is gross and it has been sitting out here getting dust all over it and it's just been bad but it has been through so many different iterations in the channel so I want to bring this back and although I do not record record in my home office anymore which is how you guys always saw it in the background of my videos because my home office was also my studio um I just kind of want to bring the Nostalgia back the other thing is I find it Bittersweet that thermal take is currently being sued for a multitude of reasons one of which being copycatting and if you guys don't recall one of the reasons why case laabs went out of business is because of the fact that they were more or less copied by thermal take and then bullied into submission by their lawyers uh about being vocal about the fact that their designs were copied although the blame still falls on on case labs for not having any sort of patents or trademarks or anything on any of their designs so if you have IP or intellectual property protect it that said um what we're going to do today is I'm going to tear down some of it I don't think I need to do a full tear down I mostly because I will probably never remember how it goes back together things go into a very specific order of operations to get like the mid panel and all that installed but there's some things I'm going to have to take off like the hinges and the snaps right here this one's all bent okay fortunately I have spares you can see each panel has like these threaded Nubs on there that kind of snap onto those like for instance this guy right here would just go and that's how they attach right it's very industrial this will allow me to have a lot of fun with the space there's been a lot of aftermarket stuff developed for this case um since I did my builds like there's mid mid distrib mid plate illumination plates there's distro plates all kinds of stuff that we can use uh to make the build more interesting plus it will allow me to do a dual loop again I can have a 560 rad on the bottom I can have a 360 rad on the front I can have a 480 rad on the top and I can have all those in there at the same time which so many cases will be like oh you can do this rad and this rad and this Rad but so many of them you can't do them all at the same time the volume of this thing is so ridiculous that yes you can do it all at the same time time with this I think I've I've sat here looking at it enough to where I'm just tired of seeing it in this state to give you an idea of how long it's been since I've used it and look I mean when the last time we saw these Corsair fans with the little removable rings on them and I remember when it was all super custom because I painted the Rings a different color anyway that said there's a lot of parts I'm going have to get for this I might do a 14th gen build in this I I also might just do the 13th gen 13900 K like golden examples that I have I have like one that I was able to get to over 40,000 pretty easily on an undervolt and then I found out my workstation one that I'm using can go to over 41,600 with a lot of voltage and it doesn't get hot so I guess we'll have to see what 14th gen holds has in store but with that said um I think we'll just go ahead oh I need to talk about what the paint I'm going to use is I'm going to try and add a little bling to this this is the stainless steel the 316 stainless steel paint that is a semi gloss but metallic I want to do a test panel on one of these to see how this looks uh I got to do some tear down we'll kind of do b-roll style and then maybe talk about some various things and uh we'll go from there okay so everything's torn apart and I've now done my test spray here and some overspray got in the front so I guess I'm kind of stuck now anyway this is that metallic silver which looks pretty cool I think um see I'm kind of conflicted cuz part of me wants to maybe spray the internal components like matte black and then silver on the outside but ah this is such a hard decision because the gunmetal like this was the first gunmetal but the thing is it's so scratched it's got scratches everywhere and stuff and I guess this would be like a patina build for a car right if you if you leave the patina CU this would have all the character of all the time Skunk Works has been taken apart and worked on and scratches and stuff on there it's part of its character but I feel like this is more of a rebirth if you will I think I need to do a bigger component to see how I feel about this as I'm sort of cleaning this off well there's no doubt it's stuck as you can see I'm using a scotch bright on here and it's not taking the paint off but I'm not happy with its uniformity um it's also very grabby it's probably because of the powder coat like over here it's super grabby it's I think it's something to do with the metallics in the paint or something it's also not very uniform it's probably just because of the the textured surface that's being painted on obviously I feel this kind of thing that needs to be like buffed after um so this is a no-go for me I now need to figure out I think I could just end up using some of the gunmetal paints I've already used however I'm getting a really good indication right now how good paint's going to stick to this textured metal because it is not scratching off as you can see that's good I might still do my black interior gunmetal EX exterior I've I've seen that before I've seen people take two sm8 a black one and a gray one and mix and match Parts um which I don't think looks bad so if I were to just now paint the parts that I want to be black black then that will work so there's that and then this goes right here so that would be everything that needs to be black as far as I can tell um because this is also a two-piece front I guess I could probably also have the frame inside right there be black but the outside be gunmetal still so black black black black I don't know go find a picture Corsair brings gaming to the next level with the Zenon 45in flexible OLED Zenon Flex display with up to 240 HZ refresh rate 0.03 millisecond gred grade response time motion blur cancelling anti-reflective coating burning protection and C customizable Bend based on users preference the Zenon Flex from Corsair allows Gamers to truly tailor their display to their liking click the link below for more details all right so I am going to paint the the internals black I looked I found some a photo of a st10 which is basically an sma8 that had the top compartment as well as the bottom and I like the way it looks so so far these are all the pieces that need to be black all this not the main components cuz basically just the exterior shell now is going to be the gunmetal and um oh and I need to do these two the frames for the radiators on the bottom I am deciding whether or not I want to just leave the external patina I guess I just need to see but um cuz I don't the problem is like the bead blasted texture that's powder coated any paint is going to fill in this texture and then I think it's going to make it uneven and as soon as I paint one panel the exterior color that way I'm screwed unless I'm going to do um aircraft remover to remove the paint which would be fine cuz it won't remove the powder coat um I'm going be kind of stuck so I'm just really conflicted I have a feeling many of the commenters right now are going to be like leave the patina leave the build it's it's a classic let it be like let it show its character and I'm starting to lean that way I honestly am but this is the kind of thing that once you make this decision you're sort of stuck with it and this is also why I guess toober test is kind of fun cuz this is something normally wouldn't do a video about so now you guys are seeing the indecisiveness along the way how's that different from any other day of mine I don't know just I'm intentionally wishy-washy today I guess okay was doing things okay so I painted the inside black as you can see with the sem trim paint it's always a challenge painting on something textured because what will happen is the paint can build up in the texture in certain areas and not others so then you'll get smooth shiny areas and then dull areas so I do the best I can with trying to build it up slowly and then I was use like scotchbrite to break down the high areas then a microfiber cloth to sort of not buff but sort of smooth it out did the best I could the mid panel is a problem though because it has that silver paint on there which I decided I didn't like so that of course is filling in the textures and I'm doing the best I can to try and recreate the texture with the paint if it doesn't work I'm just going to use aircraft remover strip the paint off repaint that piece it'll be fine the nice thing is I can reassemble the case right now and take that out independently of the case being together so starting to reassemble now will not be a problem we decided I'm going to go ahead and leave the gun metal on the exterior scratches and all um I think you guys agree Phil agrees that the the factory gunmetal should stay because it was the first gunmetal case that they had made and then the scratches that it has received over the years is just character so now I'm just going to put it back together gross so I'm an idiot it does take off powder coating it doesn't take off anodizing duh cuz anodizing is just dying the metal but powder coat is still a paint and so anyway um that's what I'm now dealing with gross let's at least show you how the case sort of looks and then I'm going to probably take this home use my pressure washer with the aircraft remover to get it off cuz there's so much pain on this thank God that mid panel is not going to really be used for anything and like covered up with a distri plate or something cuz this is bad there you go so this gives you an idea what the gunmetal and black look like obviously the mid plate is not in here right now yeah it's kind of hard to get such big areas like this to be uniform especially when they're textured but you know uh I think it's going to look pretty good even by leaving the gunmetal color the way that it is I'm happy that I decided to do that um I'm thinking for the loop 520 red and maybe even 360 on the front dedicated to just the GPU with its own Loop and then on the CPU it would have the 480 at the top for the CPU which is plenty so maybe even a 120 in the back for the front of it but that's as far as we're going to get today it's one of the things with toober Fest is sometimes you may not get the whole thing but uh we got something so I'm okay with the way this is turning out not okay with the way that's turning out that's pretty pretty disgusting but that's okay it's not the first time I've ever dealt with having a strip paint off stuff it gets pretty gross until it's done and then it's not that gross so all right guys thanks for watching and as always we'll see you in the next one and yeah this is going to turn into a full build and I'm really looking forward to it\n"