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HighSpeedPC Tech Station
Putting it Together
HighSpeedPC included some very thorough instructions with the Tech Station. It's a good idea to follow them very closely as it's not much fun to find out when you are mounting your gear that you put the two front posts upside-down, causing the PCI bracket to be too low and thus having to tear the thing halfway apart again to fix it. Not that I did that of course!no!not me!*cough* In addition to the detailed steps for assembly there are full color pictures with some close-ups to help make everything a bit more clear.  The first step of assembling the Tech Station is putting the rubber feet onto the bottom plate. You use some pretty long screws so that they stick out enough on the other end for the posts to thread onto. Be careful when you are manipulating the bottom plate with the feet on as those screws are very sharp.   With the feet on the bottom side of the bottom plate, you need to put rubber bumpers on the top side to serve as motherboard supports. There are six total motherboard supports, spaced at the edges of the board and leaving the middle of the board unsupported. This worries me a little bit, as I'm paranoid of motherboard flexing. Three additional supports would be a very welcome addition to the Tech Station. Four of the supportd are screwed onto the bottom plate from the top while two are positioned by nylon screws that are threaded from the bottom of the plate. These nylon screws stick above the rubber bumpers to help align the motherboard support holes over the rubber bumpers. Wing nuts are provided to secure the motherboard but it is highly likely you won't be able to use them as your motherboard will have components in the way. Such was the case with both the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme and the BFG nForce4 Ultra motherboards. Be careful when threading the nylon screws as they fit very snugly and the heads twist quite a bit during assembly.   Now it's time to put the four posts onto the bottom plate to serve as supports for the top plate. Two of the posts have holes about midway into them that the card support bracket will be screwed into. It's important to get the orientation right on these two posts; there should be a black dot on the top of the posts when you've tightened them into the bottom plate. You also need to make sure the posts are snug with the bottom plate but still have the holes facing out. If you look carefully at my picture of this point in the assembly process, you can see that I wasn't paying enough attention and didn't get the posts on properly. I finished assembly and was mounting components before I noticed and had to disassemble the Tech Station to fix it; quite a waste of time, so don't you do it too!  A 120mm fan is included to guarantee air flow across your hardware. This seems overkill for an open-frame chassis, but I suppose if you don't have air conditioning it will come in handy. Put the finger guard on the un-labeled side of the fan with the included fan screws and then put two of the L-brackets on the other side. The L brackets in my kit had barcode stickers on them which had to be peeled off, leaving a sticky residue behind. It's a minor gripe but these stickers seem unnecessary; I generally don't see individually labeled hardware when buying in bulk. Perhaps the guys at HSPC were short on stock and had to hit the Home Depot to pick up some parts for this unit? The bottom side of the top plate has stickers to let you know the proper mounting holes for the fan and the hard drive rails. The fan uses the holes further out and, when mounted, will stick out the side of the chassis a little bit.   Hard drives used with the Tech Station are held in place by two acrylic s-shaped rails. A small nylon spacer is used between the rails and the top plate to give adequate clearance for the drives. It would look nicer for the rails to be large enough that the spacers weren't needed, but it would also cut down on airflow to your drives. You can easily fit two drives on the Tech Station, accommodating simple RAID configurations.   Once you've got the bottom side of the top plate assembled, you can attach to the rest of the unit. Lay the neoprene mat onto the top of the top plate. You then press the screw/screw cover/washer assembly through the corners of the neoprene so that you sandwich it down while securing the top plate. Be sure to keep the neoprene flat during this process and don't over tighten the screws. The neoprene mat provides a non-slip surface for your power supply, optical drive and such to lay on while in use.   The final step in assembling the Tech Station is to add the card support brace. This is a long thin strip of plastic with many threaded holes in it. The side with the holes closest to the edge should be toward the Tech Station. Two L brackets are used to attach the support brace to the Tech Station. The screws used for the support brace are a little tough to thread into the brace but they will eventually go in. The same goes for attaching to the support posts as well. There are a number of plastic thumbscrews to hold your cards in place on the support brace. At this point you may as well screw them in so they don't get lost.    When you've got the support brace attached, you are finished with the assembly process for the Tech Station. The instructions go a little further and explain the process for using the Tech Station, but really it's all pretty obvious. The motherboard (and hardware placed on it) goes onto the bottom plate (where you put the motherboard supports) and the rest of your hardware is placed up top with the exception of the hard drives which are "hung' under the top plate.    
Page 1: Introduction & First Impressions
Page 2: Putting it Together Page 3: Testing Page 4: Conclusion 
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