 See the proper way to prep plastic is to actually, you know, scuff it up and then use alcohol. So the alcohol gets rid of the oils that are in the plastic because the oil is used as a release agent in the molding process. So when you try to paint over plastic, it doesn't always want to stick very well because of the oils and the alcohol will get rid of it. So a little tip. I think there's like a lot of the areas where we will be creative and some of the stuff we bought to be creative haven't even been really on camera at all yet. So we want to get a super clean battle station, super clean build and then add the flourish and like everything that's going to make this thing creative and unique. Tech Showdown is brought to you by Synergy 2 in partnership with G.Skill. Be quiet and cable mod. Synergy 2 makes sharing your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers so simple that anyone can use it. Learn more at the link below. So I'm painting the case feet right now. So we're going to do white on the whole case, but then we're going to do some accent pieces and pink, so some of the mesh and different things. So we thought that pink feet would be kind of a nice contrast. So just getting those painted ahead of time. Fish eyes didn't get prepped very good. Yeah so if you don't prep something and clean it really good, I don't know if you can see it, but so the black little spots that you're seeing are what's called fish eyes. And so if there's a contaminant on the surface and you try to put paint, especially if it's like an oily contaminant, it will separate the paint from the surface. And so it leaves what they call a fish eye. So this is the front panel piece. So what I did was cut it down. We removed the actual door that would go here. And we're just going to make like a filler panel to set inside here. So this was on the front of the actual door. And so I took it off and it just had to be cut down a little bit. Oh my God, that's a perfect fit. Okay. We'll mount this in here so it's permanent. And then we're going to have to drill a couple holes for our water cooling lines and then some mounting holes for the brackets for the reservoir. So our reservoir is going to, oh, I look great with this. So our reservoir is going to sit right here. And so looking at the front of the case, we'll have a reservoir on the outside. I do kind of wish that I had gone with a white primer if we were going to try and do any vibrant colors. But if we do go ahead with chocolate brown for real, then it'll work just fine. That actually looks super pro down there. All my parts drying. I mean, okay, super pro is probably an exaggeration. One of these parts is touching the sawhorse leg. Okay. I'm good. No, I'm using up all my tag board just trying to find a spot for this to dry. So my power button and my reset button are still in here. I think I have an idea for how to mask them off though. The problem is we don't have time to do like really tidy masking with, you know, razor blades and stuff. We need a piece of tape to cover what can't get paint on it. But I think if I flex this out, then I can slip this under it. I actually, you know what? I think I'm going to leave the sticky side. Wow. This must be the world's crappiest masking tape. Brilliant. So I think what I can do is just stick this in there and demonstrate once and for all that there's no problem you can't solve by flexing out and sticking it in there. Thank you. No, it's fine. I can work with this because that is what tech showdown is about. Working with what you got. In spite of Ed's best efforts to sabotage everything you hold dear. Is this a flat brown? No, no, no, no. Three cans of the clear coat. Add in clear coat? Yeah. And you want three colors of brown still? I think so. Like if we're going, you know, shades of chocolate, then we might as well go shades of chocolate. Like I really didn't want to get into the whole like painting thing with this project, but these guys have forced our hand a little bit. Like we can't show up with a not painted system at this point. Oh man, I am, I need Luke to get back here with more paint. Holy crap. This painting is taking longer than I had hoped. Okay. How long will you be there? Um, I just, I'm out of primer. The multi tonality of our color scheme is probably the only thing that saves this chocolate idea. So I need to get literally everything taken apart or we were pretty screwed. Okay. So I'm officially out of primer, which means I have to find something else to do. I'm going to start with the monitor disassembly. So in terms of color scheme for the monitor, frankly, I don't have a ton of options. We're going with, uh, with gold and chocolate. So what I was kind of thinking was gold for this thin bezel frame. Then we do a brown desktop wallpaper. Then we do, uh, I mean for this stand and I don't know, um, like we could go gold all the way and then maybe I could mask off like a, like a jagged line and we could have a brown come out the bottom or something like that. But I mean, every, every time I add, you know, masking, I'm adding more complexity to something I'm already not going to have a lot of time for. Move back. Yeah. Hey, I have a wide mix of news for you. Oh, what is this? All good though, right? Um, mostly. Uh huh. Start with the good and then tell me the better. Um, I got a lot of track. Right. There weren't a lot of trains that you could put things in. Check this out. I got the logo off. So we're going to be able to put that back on after we paint. Cool. But I got like this, which I think is cool. Um, I got this, which we can unscrew the top off of it and just use that bit. Cool. So that could like be pouring off like the GPU or something. Um, I got a little thing. So if you want to have a pad on top of the computer, this, I think we could just like put some on it or something. Okay. I don't know. And then there's only like two that you can actually put things in, which is a little sad. Nope. I think we can live with that. That'll be the thing that pulls them. Uh, that's a caboose. Oh, does that push? No. Does it matter? We need one of the stack. All right. I can get that later. Yeah, that's fine. Cool. Um, a little fire truck and a little ambulance. Oh Lordy. Okay. Yeah. We need that. Yeah. Our team needs an ambulance. Yeah. Okay. I don't know if this is gonna, I don't know if this is going to translate to like foil wrapping, but I'm sure going to. It looks okay. Wow. This is tacky, dude. Oh, no, I'm not. I'm worried about me. Keep painting. Don't you ever think about us? Oh my God. You have the primer, right? Only in therapy. No. Are you serious? Yes. Synergy two is designed to be easier and more seamless to use than synergy one features include sharing from anywhere with automatic control of any other computer without reconfiguring SSL encryption to protect your keystrokes from attackers dynamic networking. So it detects the best route based on your setup and being able to always run in the background on all your operating systems so you can set and forget and it even works across VPN and tricky home networks. If you get the pro version, you can get access to other cool features too, like clipboard sharing dragging and dropping files, copy pasting, lock screen synchronization and lots more. You're not kidding right now. No, no. Oh, that's bad. I will go get primer. Should I do ace hardware or should I just go to Home Depot? I don't know. Okay. Is there anything else you can do in the meantime? Yeah, I can keep working on the monitor. I'll find it. Don't worry. I'll find things to do. Okay, cool. I swear I could have strangled Luke when he came back without primer. My level of impress went from here. Here. I cannot believe he came back without the primer. Well, I got sick this morning, which was not good. And I'm tired. And I have to like go around the city and stuff and forget primer, which was like, oh, the main reason that I went into the store. So that was pretty bad. So Luke and I couldn't help noticing while we were checking out their super boring generic candy color scheme over here, that they have four tables. And meanwhile, we're scraping by with two. So we've liberated a table. That's how we do in Canada. Hey buddy. Actually, we'd probably just ask for it. They're American. They probably like get it, you know? Hold on. Let me just get this hanging first. Yeah, it's good. Okay. So everyone knows I just need like pink, right? And everyone knows Steve from Gamers Nexus is going to be like picky on the actual computer. But what these guys don't know is Central Park. Okay. What about it? I'll explain it in more detail later. I super don't get it. What? I have no idea. So we're almost done getting everything painted. We need to adjust the RAM, to monitor a side panel. And once we have everything under paint, we got to run and grab a couple things that we couldn't get yesterday. And then we'll be back here and we have to lay a second color of paint on our tabletop. And we want to try to get that done about four o'clock, which lets us let the paint set up a little bit. Let's pull the tape and then be done for the day and let it cure. I bet you did. Pretty darn good. So it's going to be a little bit closer on the second coat as well, because right now we have a lot of that white popping through. So you're going to see that it's really close. We've actually done pretty well. So what we're going to do now is we're going to bond this little insert panel right here that we cut. We're going to bond it into this piece and let that sit overnight so that it's good and strong. And when we come back in the morning, it'll be locked in and it'll be solid and then we can scuff it and paint it. That's the mark that I made when I kicked out my foot to try and keep it from falling. Oh, there. Oh, ****. I got that gold on it from the floor. Yeah. So Luke, this is coat number three of the monitor. This is the point where this gold either starts to look good or we give up hope on it. Okay. Cool? Yeah. Cool. The biggest surprise for me today was how well the gold turned out. I was pretty worried when I saw the first coat, because you can never judge paint by the first coat, but it's a clue. That looks pretty all right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm actually down with that. Okay. Could maybe use like one more coat, but it's definitely coming together. Hey, one more coat is a hell of a lot easier than, oh my God, blow it up. It's terrible. That whole thing that we were kind of told we couldn't do. I think they're going to go pretty far with that. You know what though? I honestly am not worried about that. Well we assumed based on that we had parts provided by sponsors. So no, we weren't explicitly told we couldn't. I was. You were. Okay, well I wasn't. I was told by you. Okay. You know how we observed that their system is like really safe, like actually like boring? I'm worried that they did that on purpose. What do you mean? I'm worried that we're looking at sort of a fraction of the idea. Well don't look at it then. Is this a bad time to mention that I don't really know how to mask and I'm just kind of winging it? I already knew that. Oh okay. If I hadn't already known that before today, I would have known it from watching you do it. So there's that. I mean it was based on your masking skills that I decided to do all the painting rather than hand off at some point. Might have just damaged the finish on one of the most important parts. The frame of the monitor. Hold on. Let me see if I can retouch it while it's still wet. I believe. So Luke, crazy thing, I'm out of stuff to paint. Mouse. Alright, done. Unless you want me doing something else but you're going to have to kind of disassemble it for me. Did you do the keyboard? I'm going to assume that I did but I can't find it. If we use a bag to mask it off, we tie it nice and tight, then I think I can probably spray around it and hit the frame. Holy crap. It does look ridiculous. It looks crazy. It's a mad scientist lab. Today was a blur because I was doing the same thing over and over and over again and I was on paint fumes. Well that's what today is going to be like. So I mean sample size of one but other than me spitting on it just now making lightsaber noises, finish on this looks pretty good. I'm really happy. So I'm going to start hitting this with paint. My goal for today is to finish painting things so that tomorrow I don't have to look at another can of paint. Speaking of which, what am I doing? I'm going to finish taping off this power supply and then I'm going to finish doing some of the stuff that we were talking about to those tubes and I need that thing. Yes. Ah, ah, yes, the thing, the secret weapon. So turns out that I had a thread ripper block on my desk the whole time. I don't know where they're going to get one. If the competition was two days, I think that would look awesome. You know what I mean? I like it. I'm like pretty pleased with how this turned out actually. Ironman. Yeah man. Too bad that's not the theme. I can't get any paint on where it is anyway, so you good? Mm hmm. Okay. Yeah, I contained it. You don't look that good. Yeah, I know. I've like filled my mouth twice in the last 10 minutes. Pretty gross. Yeah, I know. All right. That needs to be primed too. So just the block and the feet of the monitor and then we're done priming. Okay. So are we good for primer then? Yeah, we're good. But if I did send you to go buy more primer, that's what you'd buy, right? Yes. Oh my God. I hate this nozzle. Also it's leaking at the bottom. Frickin brilliant. I'm trying to imagine a way that I could be more pissed off by having two bad spray cans in a row. I think it looks chocolatey. I'm not going to get after them for the color. I think it looks chocolate. I don't think I could be more mad right now. While you and that color have had their differences, together something great has happened. What? My hand, my fingers are... Oh. The LAR card's dead. Okay, you can use theirs. Yeah. Okay, we have another one. I just have to do all of this over again. So our GPU can't be air cooled anymore because we ripped off the fan header. Which is like ridiculously on here. What I'm trying to do right now is get the block part off of it because then you could just paint this. Yeah. Swap to the other card. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to salvage some of this. Okay. Sort of. I laid it out on the ground. But like, sorry? Right now I am trying to get a rough idea of how this whole train track thing is going to be able to come together. I'm pretty unsure, but I'm going to try to make it work. I'm still painting. Thanks for asking. You know what? Yeah. Let's dioram it up for a little bit here. Just to make sure what I need to buy. We need to sanity check this. I don't want to go back to toy traders if we don't have to. So I actually don't mind our idea at this stage. We've got the train. We've got the town. We've got the theme. I think the system is going to end up looking pretty sharp. I still have some deep concerns about the water cooling because I haven't figured out how I'm going to make the limited amount of tubing that we have work with the fact that I now have to integrate a reservoir and pump. But my only concern at this point is the legs. Our plan for the legs completely fell through and we have no backup. People bought some candy from the candy train and are going to go to the park, I guess, because they're not there yet because they're by the candy train. That's a dog. It's a candy dog. It's a black licorice dog. It's not a black lab. It's a black licorice dog. There's a tree. I don't know what. It's a lollipop tree. It's a lollipop tree. Yeah. And then there's some shrubberies, which are probably going to be jube jube shrubberies. I don't know. Every previous tech showdown, the setup has been that Linus and I go shopping in the morning before tech showdown actually starts and buy all of the stuff that we're going to use because we know the theme. And then the entire duration of tech showdown is us implementing that theme. That's it. We have one shopping trip and we make it work. And with this tech showdown, we decided to sit there and try to visualize it or sit there and start taking things apart while trying to think of what we should do. And I think the best thing for us would have possibly been to just go to the dollar store and go to the other store and see what we can find like we did in previous episodes. I could also be totally wrong about that. I don't know. I just think our theme isn't super great. OK, so I've got all my tape put back over the white area so that I can just stay with the same pink area that I had before. And I tried to get it as close as I can to the same edge so that it doesn't look wiggly or anything like that. So it doesn't have to be super perfect. But I'm going to go ahead and just roll the pink back over the top of this. You can maybe see on the camera there's some light areas and dark areas. And so you'll get that just on your first coat. And so on the second coat and then if you go with like a third coat, it'll darken up more and more each time. So it'll become more solid. It is better, but just magnetic. So those just drop off. Now we have our pink and white mouse to match. And they're ready to lock into place. Oh, except for it won't look right on the inside corners when we go. Wow. So this is an awesome fact. Only 60 calories. Contains 20 servings at 60 calories. We have to put our steel bendable rods into our lollipop. So I got to cut the dowel off and now I'll have to drill a small hole in to fit the steel rod just right. Yeah, sweet pink. It's a little lighter, but not too bad. Okay. A lot of paint on these parts. Keyboard is all pink keys, white keyboard. And with the white PCB cover underneath, we should get a nice sweet glow from the... This might be a trick. What? This might be a trick to get this. To stay? Oh, why am I so long? Oh, that's right. I left it long though. Oh, dang it. Okay. So here's the little box I made. The adhesive is still a little bit on the sticky side. Oh, nice, dude. What? That's awesome. Oh, dude, that does look good. Isn't that sweet? Yeah, that's sweet. All right. I have two. They've bubbled up and look horrible. Really? Oh yeah. That's tough. Huh? Oh, it's not quite. Actually Colton actually thought we did do it for a living. Oh no. We don't. We have day jobs, man. Yeah. I said something about working on servers and stuff and he's like, you what? Yeah. Both of us do this as kind of a professional hobby. I think is the best way to describe it. We try to achieve professional results, but both of us work five days a week and we're up here all week on vacation. That's a really bad, ugly contrast. We could paint them. The problem is durability of paint. Wow. That's hideous. We could just pull this front cover and just blast the whole thing. Yeah, I'm gonna have to do that. I have to fix a couple of these heights. That's hideous. Okay. So yeah, keyboard, mouse, monitor, tower. Bob's an OCD freak, which makes working with him sometimes really challenging, especially since I'm not at all. And he gets easily distracted. But having someone who's an OCD freak on a case modding team, it's pretty valuable because everything gets put exactly the way it should be on the finished product. And that sound means it's the end of the workday and the end of the show. Tune in next week when the boys will assemble their final builds and present them to the three celebrity judges. Will iJustine be tickled pink? Will Central Park leave its mark on Riley? And will Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus be impressed by things that Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus would be impressed by? All will be revealed next week on the final episode of Tech Showdown.