Started this mod a while ago, put it on the shelf ( or in my case in the pile of broken dreams / unfinished projects ) and just recently decided to finish it off. It was just a standard no name brand 52x CD burner I had laying around. I put it in my current desktop which is showing its age pretty well. When I bought the case in 2003, I had no intentions of modding it, or overclocking the hardware, and as it turns out, I've been doing a lot of both recently. I'm trying to make it stretch to Q1 2006 so hopefully I can buy an X2 at decent price. Anyway, to the pics . . . . Here we have out victim waiting disassembly Pulled apart and ready to go. The lid and my template I drew up in Autocad. A little bit of spray glue and the template gives you a great cutting guide. This part kind of sucked. In order for the plexi to clear the case I had to remove a tenth of an inch of plastic from the base. Lacking the correct tools and it being too cold out at the time go outside and do this with a sander, I used an X-acto blade. It worked ok . . . Yeah the right tools would have been nice. Well I guess its not a mod without blood. This is the part of the thread where I apologize for forgetting to take pictures. In all serious though you didnt miss much. Just some and me installing some LED's inside. Doesnt look bad here. Heres a fun fact: I couldnt find any edging that fit the drive correctly and I didnt feel like waiting and ordering any ( I was on a roll ). So I made my own. I took screen door spine ( the stuff used for holding window screen into its frame ) and just cut it lengthwise with an Xacto. $3 gets you like 20 feet of the stuff. Installed in my chassis. In person the lighting effect looks awesome. The whole interior lights up and illuminates the spinning disk. However my camera doesnt pick it up too well. Here's a shot through the front to show the LEDS. I like the orange color alot in the case. Here it is installed. I've tested it by burning a few CD's and installing some software with it. So far works like a champ. And for fun a night shot of the case. For some reason my UV cathodes show up way bluer than they really are. This is before I finished sleaving the rest of the PSU. All thats left in the works is to add a blowhole in the top plexi and to shuffle some more cables around. I'll post some more pics in a few days. You like?
very nice job dude , one of the better cdrom mods ive seen, and umm questions:, you did use 3 peices of plexi right?, and can you describe your proccess for the stripping on the plexy a little more?, and again nice job
Nope one piece of plexi. I cut out a rectangle and then put a hole in it with a hole saw in order to clear the spindle support. The black stripping is just window screen spine that I cut down the middle to make a slit. I ended up making a little jig to do it with to make it easier on my hands. You could probally use any rubber tube thats like .150 inch in diameter and has a hole in it. Yeh I like nice simple geometric shapes for windows. Im big on cheap / simple / pleasing mods, and I think this one fits pretty well. And ellipr97 I cut out the window in the CD-ROM with a cut off wheel on a hand grinder, and then cleaned up with a dremel clone and files, and the window in the case itself was cut using a Jigsaw and cleaned up with a dremel. The computer case is thick steel so the jigsaw was a must. It only took me 10 minutes of cutting and cleaning for the computer case. Wish I could say that for the CD-ROM, that was a lot of dremel and hand file work.
lol probly was too cold outside beacuse you were modding at 11:00pm lol cool project doe i would do it but no 1 can see it lol
Really like the look of this - the edging and three seperate bits of plexi make it look a lot cleaner than others that I have seen - just off to change my case design to allow for a top window now... Ho hum, this design tends to change a little bit with every mod that I see these days? Will it ever get out of planning? I just don't know.
