Custom Painting a Thermaltake Core V51 Casemodding Project

My plans for this case are rather straight forward and would involve painting a few select sections of the case to create a nice contrast between the black panels and new painted parts.  The first step will be to tear the case down and separate the parts I need to paint from the rest of the chassis.

The Core V51 is a traditional case in that it features external drive bays, a large side window and comes with an elegant shape.  Metal mesh covers the front bezel while magnetic filters keep dust from entering from the top.

One of the LCS (Liquid Cooling System) features is the ability to move and remove the internal drive bays giving you more room for watercooling gear.  While this is a great feature they do tend to rattle a bit, depending on what hardware you have installed.

This phase of the mod is simply to break down the case to give me better access to selectively paint certain parts to achieve the look I am after.  This is a little more labor intensive but is almost required considering the type of paint I’ll be using.

In my previous painting projects I painted the interior pieces and many of the removable accent parts.  For this mod I decided to recolor most of the case while still leaving many of the interior parts alone.  That means instead of painting the metal mesh I would paint the underlying plastic, top and side panels.

To remove the top panel and drive cage rails I needed to drill out the rivets.  If you ever do this on your own keep these things in mind.

• Most of the time the rivets are not snapped down good and will spin.  Using some needle nose pliers hold the back side of the rivet and carefully drill down the center.
• The heads of the rivets will create this mess on your drill bit.  These metal bits are sharp and will scratch the case and cut your fingers so clean them off often.   Pliers and reversing the drill are the trick.

When you are done you will have something like this.