Meetuppic

That’s right! On April 11th, an unprecedented meeting of some of the best modders in the country will be happening, right here, in Downing’s Basement! The culmination of over 7 months worth of planning is all actually happening and if you told me a year ago I’d have this kind of company in my house/workshop, I wouldn’t have believed it!

Let’s put this into perspective a bit. There are 6 people coming to this event from April 11th to the 15th. I live in the capital city of New Hampshire. The guest list brings people from the states of PA, CT, SC, GA and CA! Yes, I’ve pretty much got the entire Eastern seaboard headed north and one from as far west as you can go, Hollywood California. Can you see what I’m starting to get excited?!

The only thing that makes the fact these guys are traveling so far for this is “who” is traveling so far for this. Those who follow console modding at all know that there are a few out there who rise above in most cases and those few are the ones making the trip. Here’s a quick list.

From NY, we have Beta and Aux, two students at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Aux is also a Moderator on the Mod Retro forums and Beta is in line for potential work opportunities at Oculus, the new virtual reality headset that has taken the nation by storm. I look forward to their knowledge and meeting them in person.

From PA, The Game Cube Master himself, Ashen. He went to a meet-up in TN a year ago and we got a good chance to see what he’s made of. His work on Game Cube innovation has been amazing.

From GA, the very man that got me into this hobby to begin with, none other than the maker of the Darth64 and dozens of other amazing mod, Hailrazer! Yeah, I know right! Look him up if you don’t know!

From CA, making the longest trip and is also a Moderator on the Mod Retro Forums, Tchay! Tchay is the maker of the Envision which was another amazing portable Game Cube and has since become a hot seller of his.

And last but not least, from SC, the legendary old pal, Shock Slayer! If you don’t know who his is, it won’t take long to figure it out. Former Admin of the Mod Retro forums and now running his own site, SS is probably one of the most notorious modders in the hobby.

So anyway, we’ll have more update for you soon enough but you can see that I’m quite excited and for good reason. We’ll be doing a live stream of the even on Friday the 12th, so we’ll get you more info on where and when that will be happening! All in all, I’m very excited for this! Stay tuned for more!

Word seems to have gotten out about the work I’ve been doing for other modders and in the last week alone I’ve taken on over 5 new case jobs for 3 different modders doing console commissions for other people as well. Now this doesn’t sound like a lot but compared to previous numbers of 1 or 2 jobs a month, 5 in a week is quite the increase.

The job above is a simple case cut from a Poly Case SL-68 for MBB forum member [Gman] who runs a small operation known a [Gman Modz]. He’s been doing some pretty impressive work as of late and I’m glad to be helping him out with some of his projects. This one was a run of 3 cases, all cut the same and are for Portable Nintendo 64’s. Given the size of these cases, it will be quite impressive to see these completed.

That said, I am also in the process of doing a full vacuumed-formed custom Portable Game Cube casing which will have a surprising similarity to another console on the market today. Stay tuned for that one!

Been quite awhile since I posted a new video and though it’s nothing special, it’s still an update in video form.

For those who don’t know, for the past year now I’ve been working on a new vacuum forming machine with friend and owner of Complex Mold & Machine, Jon Seik. He’s got a very well set-up shop and his experiences in machine and mold design have been ever so helpful in this process. I’m not sure how much longer this is going to take to complete, but it’s a fun time every time we get to work on it.

Anyway, here’s the video and as always if you have any questions or just feel like making some noise, feel free to leave comment below!

 

 

So last month my buddy [SS] set me up with another case cutting job for another commission of his. This time a portable Wii Laptop, which would be made up of 2 [Poly Case] casings, the ZN45 for the base and the ZN40 for the screen. I finished these up early this week and he just received them today and was very pleased! Though I don’t take credit for the design as his friend [Beta] did all the CAD work, the cut job was still a lot of work, but was quite fun.

Now this would have been done a lot sooner had I not decided to tare apart my whole CNC control system and be down for two weeks because of one damn wire being in the wrong spot, but it is what it is and all is good for now!

So I look forward to see these projects of his put these casings to good use. They should be pretty cool any way so I will wait patiently and report on them when I see them!

So after suffering from some of the biggest headaches I’ve had to deal with in a long time, the control box for my router is completed. I wanna thank my friend [Dave Russo] for coming over and not only help solve the issue with CNC (which of course was only a single wire connected incorrectly) but also for helping me fix my main PC and upgrading to a Solid State Drive. Much thanks my friend.

So back to the CNC, the general premise of the project was to make up some space that my old PC tower and the CNC control box itself was taking up. Granted now a lot more space on top is taken up, everything is now in one location and even has a nifty little PSOne screen acting as a second monitor for the PC!

Though this isn’t perfect, it does the job. I will be trying to mod the PS1 screen so it outputs RGB as right now the resolution isn’t very clear going through a VGA to composite coverter and it’s quite wavy to boot, so something will need to be done, but for now I’ve got it working and have been able to do the jobs for [ShockSlayer and Bud] that I had put on hold because of the snags. I’ll have an upcoming post about those in the future as well.

But for now, sorry for the lack of posting and activity but there have been lots and lots of things going on that haven taken up my posting time! I did shoot a video of this but my camera was being stupid and wouldn’t compensate for the lighting so you might as well have been looking at a white screen. May still post it, but we’ll see. More to come soon!

Made quite a bit of progress over the past few days. Though I ran into a nasty snag yesterday trying to get the PC to even turn on. Turned out the On/Off header that the power button connected to was color coded incorrectly. So instead of hooking up the switch, I was plugging in the LED instead which just shorted out the power supply!

So after 2.5hrs of screwing around with that, I was able to start making some real progress. With that said, the list of accomplishments go as follows:

  • PS1 screen mounted, wired and tested. Composite for now.
  • All buttons, LEDs and Spindle control installed.
  • Face plate rough mounted.
  • All wires extended and plugged in.
  • ATI X1300 128MB graphics card installed.

A full update and pics can be seen on MBB as always.

Progress still needing to be made:

  • Finish wiring up the CNC Controller to the face plate
  • Cut plastic panels and mount back hardware (i.e. spindle and stepper motor jacks)
  • Prime and paint the main box
  • Label buttons and add decals

I’m hoping by the end of Saturday I’ll have much more complete, at least to the point I can get my router running again as I have a few jobs that I need to get started on, including another case for a ShockSlayer commission. If you didn’t see his previous video of the last case I sent him, have a look. Quite comical in its approach and not the format I was expecting, but fun to watch regardless!