www.Viperlair.com - Bubble-Plexi Mod

I'm Matthew, aka NovaScorpio, and this is my first formal case mod [I did start a window for my panel which was destroyed (not by me!)& I'll get into that some other time&] The premise for the following mod is as follows: About 2 years ago I constructed a new computer for myself and used the Fong Kai 320 Black case under the recommendation of Anandtech.

Finally choosing my logo, I wanted to make some sort of display of my logo on the front of my case, perhaps similar to the one shown :

But a biohazard sign is very universal, not so unique& I'd want something to represent me& so I found a piece of art made by snecx ( - great artist). With his permission I was permitted to use this image:

Only, there were 2 problems:
1) I don't have a case made out of plexiglass and tinted windows
2) My front bezel isn't flat& it's curved

The design is too complex to just cut out with a Dremel on the bezel - and even if I wanted to cut it out, the bezel is made of plastic, it cuts like butter under the Dremel, if I did use the Dremel to cut the design out, I would need to be especially careful.

I resolved to do something else& something I haven't seen as of yet. Bubbled Plexiglass:

So here's my warning - I, NovaScorpio and Viper's Lair take no responsibility whatsoever for any actions that might be taken because of this article in any aspect whatsoever - inspired or following directions. The stuff that's done in this article isn't exactly kids stuff, I hurt my self a few times [no, I'm not ashamed to admit it!] and I was being pretty careful. If this is done recklessly, you could very well hurt yourself badly.

Cutting plexiglass - Just be careful and consistent& I'm not genius at cutting plexi, but with a box cutter you should be OK. That being said, don't cut your finger off.

Melting plexiglass - this means we need a high heat source. Just a note here on melting plexiglass and other plastics - if a plastic starts to melt, it's viscosity changes - it will flow easily, and will cool rather quickly. If you melt the plexiglass and then you slip and it comes in contact with your skin, not only will it burn you severely, but the plexiglass will also stick to your skin. It will stick on you as if it were holding on for dear life - you can get a third degree burn this way.

Cutting with an exact-o knife - you can take skin off pretty damn easily this way, stitches are not fun.

Painting with spray paint - Don't huff paint. It's stupid. Get a paint respirator or use a rag.
All right. So now that I've gotten the warnings out of the way you're psyched up to get yourself some bubbled plexi action. And if you didn't read the warnings then shame on you& or something.

Note: The bubble that I have made is rather steep. The same kind of procedures can be used to make a shallower curved bubble.

1 x Box cutter [to cut plexi]
1 x Exact-o knife [to cut masking tape]
1 x Plexiglass (depends on how big you want your bubble to be)
1 x Metal Tongs [to hold plexi while heating]
1 x Gas Stove (or other method of high heat source)
1 x Dremel (or other method of cutting out a hole)
1 x 40 Grit sanding bit
1 x Cutoff Wheel
1 x Masking Tape
1 x Cutting Board
1 x Paint (choose your color to match the bezel, eh?)
1 x Can (Some way to prototype your hole)
1 x Epoxy [You can also use hot glue if you don't know if this'll be permanent]

Lighting (use whatever you want&)
I wanted an even distribution of light, and green seemed like an OK color so&
1 x Indiglo Night-Light [walgreens]
1 x Soldering Iron
1 x Solder

1. Cut hole out
2. Heat and bubble plexi
3. Cut out shape [in masking tape]
4. Spray paint
5. Secure bubble to bezel
6. Light it up

Each of these 6 steps have subsections to them, and each can be done right if you're not in too much of a rush, in a pretty simple way.

The first step to cutting anything, ever is to first plan it out. Maybe draw on paper what you think would look good. Go ahead and experiment a little, don't choose something that you don't think you'll like later. I decided that since my bezel was curved, there was no way I could just slap some plexi on it and etch out the symbol or anything& so I said maybe I could just cut it out. I took a drill to the plastic and it went through my bezel plastic quite quickly - without any resistance practically - so I had to rethink this.

A circle - a round hole with my insignia, that seemed like the best option. So I'm going to cut out a hole& so how do I start this out? Dremel + Cutting wheel.

I used a coke can to measure out a circle and penciled it in. Then I used a ruler to make a square from which I would cut out the center of the circle from. After that I would just sand the rest of the plastic away with the Dremel.

To the basement I went and cut out the box easily, then proceeded with the Dremel and sanding bit - and I got this:

Wow. What a piece of crap. That hole is ovalish and honestly quite disgusting. Not only is the hole itself ovalish, it's off-center. What happened?

1) The first thing that I have learned from this is that you must use some sort of permanent or non-permanent but strong marker or tape to mark off areas not to cut off. The pencil outline faded and left as I got closer to the marks themselves. If you're cutting up a part of your case, do it right - don't eyeball things, do them right. So I took a roll of masking tape, re-centered the hole [since it was ovalish and to the left I matched up the left most part of the tape with the leftmost part of the oval] using a permanent marker (sharpie) to make the outline.

2) The second thing was the speed of my drill. The drill was set to its top speed when I was sanding away parts of the plastic. Big Mistake. The plastic itself will start melting, which can be bad, causing disfiguration and in my case, if I hadn't been careful, the curve of my bezel would have been ruined. When I lowered the speed to about setting 3 (from 1-5) the sanding was actually more efficient, and by only touching the plastic when I was sanding it, I was able to achieve a much better curve.

First you must obtain a piece of plexi for the bubbling process - you actually might want to buy 2 just in case you screw up the first time or your bubble is too big. Plexiglass can always be reheated so don't worry about it if the bubble isn't big enough.

Important notes:
1) DO NOT use a lighter. Do not let the flames "lick" the plexiglass. This can be disastrous. Don't believe me?

2) Orange flames are the colder flames. Blue are warmer. You want to get a source which has a blue flame and hold it approximately 3 to 5 inches above that heat source. The radius of my hole was only about 1.5 inches, so a small gas stove worked perfectly - if you have a bigger piece then you might have to come up with a way to heat it otherwise. I noticed that if you use a VERY HOT liter then you may be able to achieve the melting without burning.

3) PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE use a test piece of plexiglass. Take a piece from the sheet you have or a piece that is from *the same brand* and try melting it. Experiment, see how long it takes for it to burn. Find out how you can allow it to melt without hurting it in any way. The reason I say this is because there are many plexi brands and the method I used may only be applicable for the amounts of time and heat that I used. A heat gun was suggested to me for the bubbling process - I've never seen or used one though.

1) First start the heat source and make sure that it's good by testing the test-strip of plexi - hold a small portion of it with the metal thongs - don't burn your hand.

Notice the flame is blue. I'm not going to get into chemistry and physics here, but the visible colors are ROYGBV - Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Violet. Red requires more energy to be released as a color - if less energy in a flame is going towards color, then more is going towards heat. So Blue/Violet flames [or ones you can't see] are the hottest& If you don't believe me, check out a Bunsen burner.

2) Take the plexi and heat it until it becomes very soft - if you can hold the piece horizontally still, it's not hot enough. (I.E. the picture above)

3) While heating, make sure you don't leave it in the same spot, move it up, down, and left and right so that if there's a disparage in the heat source 1 part of the plexi doesn't get heated more than other parts.

4) When you have your plexi heated to a reasonable point (it's quite flexible& if you had been holding the piece as I held it in the previous picture, you would probably have something along the lines of the following picture:

Place it in your hole or square. This is where the metal tongs come in handy if they're slightly rounded.

5) Push down in the center of your hole. Then take the thongs and spread them outward as your let the tongs rise up out of the hole. This way you are creating a vertex of the bubble and allowing for the vertex to have a surrounding with similar height. This process is illustrated in the following pictures (credit to Davzing for his l337 modeling tekniq)...

Then start pushing out towards the side while letting the tongs recess towards the top...

Just a note here, The previous pictures were dramatizations - the aspects are off, and it must be noted that if one is to push down the plastic this much they wouldn't get a bubble looking like the last picture.

Instead, experiment a little, push it down a little at a time until you master this technique and you will get a very close to perfect bubble.

6) Repeat this with the tongs until the plastic becomes so hard you can't do it anymore. Make sure you can remove the plexi from the bezel - you don't want it to be melted on. If it is kind of melted on try pulling it off or prying it off - perhaps you can try heating the melted on part with a lighter (this I did do), and then pulling it off
7) If you don't like your bubble, then keep reheating it until you get a good one
8) If you realize your bubble is too big, you're screwed. Start over.
9) Finally, make sure the edges are on (touching) the bezel itself so that you can secure it later

I did not do this with a lighter and don't advise it (at least not in this manner for the heating& perhaps you could move the lighter around to heat the whole piece? I don't know, it's really better to use the gas stove).

Wow! You've got a piece of plexiglass that's bubbled. Awesome. Now to make a logo on it.

Next print out your image, or draw it. After that, print out 2 more copies. With the cutting board, practice cutting your shape out 2 times or so with the exact-o knife. Trust me, its worth it to practice.

Once you've got your shape-cutting perfected, follow this process:

1) Clean your cutting board [I actually used plexi to cut on, it was clean]
2) Cut your image out as exactly as possible
3) Place pieces of masking tape on the board, making sure there are no air bubbles and ensuring that the pieces of tape overlap each other a reasonable amount (1/2 an inch?)
4) Place the cut out on the tape
5) Tape over the cut out image. This will keep the image in place.
6) Apply pressure over the image so you can see exactly where the cutout ends.
7) Finally, cut with the exact-o knife.

Now you have 2 objects. The original cutout with tape on top of it, and a tape cutout still on the cutting board.

8) Slowly and gently peel off the tape as to not rip it.

Okay, so now you're pretty proud of yourself& You've made the perfect bubble and you've got a really kickass pattern or image.

Please, test out how the paint you're going to use will react with your plexi with your test-strip of plexi. I used Rust-Oleum Professional High Performance Enamel (Flat Black.) The plexi will be shiny with something behind it so there's no reason to use a shiny color - it works kind of like a plastic varnish. If you want it to be kinda duller - almost like it's frosted greatly, then try taking some very fine sand paper [1500 -> 2000 grit] and lightly sand it (wet sand.)

Place the masking tape on the inside of the bubble. Now, place masking tape on the outside of the bubble so it doesn't get sprayed accidentally and will prevent runoff. I've seen it happen... Lay down some newspaper or whatever and if you can, try to prop the bubble so that it's as even as possible. Please recognize that the paint towards the outside will drip towards the inside, so it is vital that you spray at least 2 or 3 times. Make sure you rotate the bubble while doing this also so that if the paint kind of solidifies towards 1 side, the other side will also have paint.

I messed up this way, I didn't rotate the bubble, I just put on 2 coats and peeled of the masking tape. The paint was there, but there was still light bleeding through - I had to take my sharpie and on the back of the bubble color it in so the light didn't bleed through.

Depending on your paint brand you will have to wait until the paint is dry to the touch. Then remove the masking tape.

Let the paint cure for some time [12 -> 24 hours or so].

In this case, this was the outcome:

Okay, since you did make this on your bezel it should conform to it pretty well. Just position it on the bezel and use Epoxy or hot glue. Make sure that you position it correctly, plan it out with tape - First I secured it with tape and applied epoxy.

This really is dependant on what you want to do. I used an indiglo light to power the light source behind it, and I'm going to get a blue light filter also so it's not so green. A howto for rigging an indiglo light inside your case will be coming soon I believe, but so far unless I want to solder this onto my PSU, I'm going to have wires running out the back of my case.

Good luck making your bubbles - there are still many possible ventures which have not been explored yet - etching on the bubble, using it for a water supply, or even building in a hand-rest to your plexi lighted mouse pad. I will say though, that if you plan to etch, do it after you make your bubble because when the plastic melts it might screw up the etch. And don't forget to be safe - there's no point in making a case mod if you're going to burn off ½ the skin on your thumb.

If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

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