Stupid Projects

Stealthing the DVD drive was the first part of this project to be completed for the simple reason that it was ugly. It looked really bad and drove me nuts. The drives out of a Pavillion just weren't meant to go in a normal beige case.

I ran into the problem that my case doesn't let me slide the drive far enough back to do the normal thing of just cutting off the clips on a bay cover and building up the back with something. I ended up sanding all the back edges down until I was left with a flat plastic sheet. The front cover of the disc tray had to be removed and replaced with double sided tape to get the bay cover to fit close enough to the drive to be flush with the other covers.

Then a new problem. If you have the stealth cover pull in too tight when the tray closes, it has a tendancy to press the button and eject the tray again. Struggling with that at 2am was a little frustrating. Eventually just sticking another layer of tape in fixed it and its worked great ever since.

If you look at the bottom right corner, it doesn't look quite right. I've fixed it since the picture was taken. Fixing that one involved removing the drive to do a little work on one of the screw slots in the bay. With the drive out, I found that the cover fits tight enough to the drive that it looks like it could have come that way originally.

The next part that I worked on was the power supply. The fan in the original 300W ps died so I decided to upgrade to a 400W ps when replacing it. Its just a cheap Powmax that I got off ebay. The cables were tangled really bad so I had to remove the connecters and untangle them as much as possible. To improve the appearance of the cables I used black split loom and and halfed strips of black duct tape.

Ribbon cables are ugly and a pain to work with so I replaced them with silver round ones which look better but still aren't much fun to work with. When is that serial ATA stuff going to be the cheap standard?

I looked around the internet for a while and came to the conclusion that the standard window designs and window kits suck. They're all similar and boring so I decided I needed to go with a custom design and made one based on the Decepticon logo. The paper cut out in the middle of the design layout was traced from my window applique.

The cutting was done with a jigsaw. Then a dremel and a file were used to clean up the edges. The design involves trimming the window with chrome automotive trim so having the edges perfectly smooth didn't matter. The plexiglass is held in with plastic emblem adhesive.

I'm using a UV Sunbeam dual CCFL kit in this computer.

The air flow through the stock case's vents was pathetic.

A case badge from ShadowMajik. oooo. aaahhhh.