Making a Blowhole - Making a Blowhole
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PROJECT BLOWHOLE
Alright, there you are sitting there with power tool in hand ready to tear something apart, but I have to ask ya to wait just a little bit longer. If you have a case with removable sides and top, you're in the house. However, if you have a case that does not have removable panels and you want the blowhole in a section that can't be removed its time to get to work. You need to remove everything from inside of your case, and I mean EVERYTHING!! Fans, power supply, drives, mobo, everything. Tiny metal shavings and computer components don't get along, they get together decide that they don't want to work anymore, so for the health of your PC, TAKE IT ALL OUT!!!!
Now that you have everything removed, or the panel you want the blowhole in removed, its time to start measuring.
You need to decide where you want your hole located, I personally chose my side blowholes to be split between the bottom of my CPU and the top of my AGP slot. This way you are throwing fresh room temperature air evenly across that hotter than hell CPU and the too hot to touch video card. to do this it was time to measure. Measure the distance from the bottom of your case to where you want the CENTER of the fan to be, as I stated earlier, I chose the bottom of the Slot 1 of my BE6II motherboard. There, now you have the height of your fans. Now measure the distance from the back of your case to the place you want the CENTER of your fan to be. I again chose the Slot 1 to be my reference point. Something to remember here, you can measure all day long, but you only get ONE SHOT at drilling the hole in your case, so make sure its right.
As you can see above in our dual blowhole project, we took our center point, and placed our fan over it and drew an outline of it. While we had our fan in place, we went ahead and marked the screw hole location with a pencil. We then drew an "X" from the corners to make our center point more pronounced, it also let us correctly align our fans side by side for our twin blowhole setup.
Once you have made your marks, and are ABSOLUTELY certain that your measurement are correct, it's time to drill your pilot hole. While the hole saw has a bit in the center, we prefer to use a smaller drill bit for the pilot hole because it is easier to see with a regular bit and a smaller bit is less likely to slip, this point going back to the "you only get one chance" deal.
Congratulations, you have now successfully passed the point of no return. There are now holes in the side of your case that you cannot take back. We have now come to the time when the six pack on the materials list comes in handy. I highly recommend you break one out and have a few sips of a cold one.
Now that you've had a cool refreshing drink, its time to get out that baby oil. (If this is a familiar action, GET A GIRLFRIEND!!!) With that baby oil we are going to apply a rather generous coat of it over the area where you are about to put the hole saw too. Put enough on there that its coated but not so much that ya get turned on just to touch it!! The reason for this is your hole saw will last longer and the hole will cut easier with less friction.
Once ya get your case nice and lubed, its time to break out the hole saw. For those of you that haven't seen a hole saw before, they look like this:
Now that you've admired the sheer beauty of this beast, hit the next button and lets break some stuff!!
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