Homestarrunner.com updated 12-31-04 SOON TO BE UP AND RUNNING!!!

Project Homestarrunner

Hey everybody I have been around the forums for a little while and have never posted any of my projects so I decided that it was time to post.

First of all I would like everyone to check out the wonderful website http://homestarrunner.com/, the site that inspired me to do this project. You will probably not understand half the things I am doing in this mod if you do not see some of the strong bad e-mails. I am about half way done with this project but have waited so long to post because I wanted to have my project be updated fairly often and not get lost in the Bit-tech database. Ok on to the project!!!!!

Well this project is called Homestarrunner.com. The actual computer is nothing special, maybe a PIII 676 or something around there. And the case is just a case that I managed to score from my dads work (no I didn’t steal it, they were upgrading). The main thing that I use this computer for is so that I can say I have multiple computers in my room there is no real purpose for it because it can’t do a whole lot, most limited by the lack of hard drive space.

Here are some of the things that I plan on accomplishing in this modd:

- Paint this on the side:



- Cut a star shaped window in the side
- Make a new front faceplate
- Stealth my DVD drive
- Move all buttons and LED’s from faceplate to back of computer
- and I will probably get cool ideas while I am modding and do them, I never really plan that much

Here is my case before I modded it:



I was looking around the forums and noticed that by sanding your case to a shiny silver it looked pretty nice so I spent some time sanding my case, the result:



Next I cut out the window in the side, I though it turned out pretty nice:



I will give more information in my next update which will be on 2-12-04.
Please post some comments

 

Nice case dip weed. (I can call him that because I am his older brother) The silver looks kind of strange in the pictures though.

 

awesome!
funny enough, i'm wearing the "the cheat" tshirt now
homestarrunner.com is great! you better submit this to the brothers chaps when you finish, i'm sure they'll post it on their site

 

lol great site, and great case, cant wait to see the finished result

 

Homestarrunner.com updated 2/12/04

Update: Monitor

After I had finished sanding the case and I had cut out the window I decided that if I want to make my computer look really cool than I should go ahead and modd the monitor. The monitor just wouldn’t blend in very with the rest of the case if it was that ugly beige color. So I decided that it would be cool if I cut some windows in the monitor so that you could see all the stuff on the inside, the result:



I next decided that it would be necessary to paint the monitor because that ugly beige color just wouldn’t blend in with the rest of my modd. So I painted the entire thing red:



Here is a picture of the monitor painted red and the windows installed:



Next I was looking at my recently painted monitor and said to my self…..this is just way to bland, and then all of a sudden a awesome idea came to me. Why not have the outer edge of the monitor, around the screen, blend in my desktop??? Not only would this look really awesome but I have not seen anyone else do this yet!!!!!!! So here is what I came up with:



Now that alone doesn’t look that great but with the desktop it looks awesome, the desktop:



And here is a picture of the whole monitor:



As a final touch I added a UV light in the monitor, it was a tight fit but it works. I don’t have a picture of it because my camera can’t capture the UV light for some reason. But it looks pretty cool because it lights up the inside and makes quite a good number of the parts on the inside glow.

I wil have an update soon. It will probably be sometime this week, it will continue the progress that i am making with the original case.
Thanks for checking this out, and thanks for all the comments. If you have any questions feel free to post them.

 

The monitor looks cool with that background.

 

that looks cool man. i love the way you did the monitor paint to match the desktop. that looks damned good.

 

looks nice, can you say how you painted your monitor???

 

When I first saw this thread, I thought "oh great, some fanboy being an idiot." Then I read the content and looked at the work you did. It looks really amazing and if there was a "foot in your mouth" smiley, I'd be using it all over the place right now. You did some excellent work and I admire the desktop blending into the paint job. I'm also a fan of red monitors, as I have a 19" one on my desk at home. Great work, BAC. I'll be checking up on this one.


[edit]Be careful with spraypainted keys. Make sure you've got a really good clear layer over them, or the paint starts turning into gum. I know this from personal experience.[/edit]

 

I like the idea of having the monitor blend with the wallpaper, but the paint looks a bit messy. Did you prep the surface first? Sand it, clean it off? Also, try to make the lines cleaner, the black looks messed up, you need to tape it off really well so you get clean lines...if you just fix that I think it would look a whole lot better

 

About the keyboard....well i am goign to have an update on the construction of that pretty soon. And luckily the keysdon't sitck they still hvae that smoothness that a keyboard should have.

TekMonkey: I would have made the line more precise on the monitor but when used my stencil to paint it on it had a small fade out effect to it that i really liked....kinda fades out from the screen. Also the pictures are kind of shatty quality, sorry about that.

white modder: I painted the monitor just wiht spray paint. I think i may be a spray paint fanatic cause that is the only way that i paint anything, but it still turns out pretty nice. But the way that i did the black lines and the white mouth, that was just by using a stencil that i cut out of manila envelope. The reason why it fades out is becuase the stencil was not pressed all the way down. But I decided to leave it with that fading out look.

Also I put 3 coats of Gloss enamel spray paint on the entire monitor so it shimmers a little bit.

Oh and poppa_joe....thanks for the self esteem support bro....just kidding.

 

you could use a sharpie or black paint pen to get crisper lines around strongbad's maskal area
with his mouth, a white paint pen

awesome idea, i was concidering doing something similar with my zelda themed case, but decided against it, because i like to change wallpapers

 

Updated:Keyboard 2-13-04

Update: Keyboard

Well as you saw in the pictures of my monitor I have painted my keyboard. Like an idiot I forgot to take pictures of my keyboard before it was painted, but I am sure that most of you have seen them. It was a Gateway keyboard that I got for free because someone was throwing it out. I love computer illiterate people!?!?!?!??!?!?

Ok on to the modding. Well I first opened up my keyboard and discovered this:



The weirdest part was that unlike most keyboards all the keys were attached to a plastic sheet that acted as a base for the keys. I didn’t plan on painting the keyboard at first because I thought I would have to paint each individual key which would take forever, but thankfully I didn’t have to do this. I did have to paint the media keys separately but I don’t really use those anyways. I painted them by putting a straw in the little hole on the bottom, I saw somebody else do it, and I would give them credit for it if I knew who they were.

So what I did to the keyboard was …..well all I did was paint it red nothing special, but after I painted my monitor red, the beige keyboard just didn’t blend in. Here are some pictures of the process:



And this is what I have ended up with in the end:



The lettering on the keyboard looks like **** but that is because I hand drew the letters and other characters on with a sharpie and my hand writing sucks. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how to get the letter on because I am willing to repaint the keyboard to fix the bad paint job.

I also am planning on replacing the green LED’s in the keyboard with some really bright red LED’s, or maybe yellow, I will test out which one looks best on the red background.

I have a problem though, as you can see the cord is still that ugly gray-ish color. I need to either vinyl dye it or make a cable enclosure for it. The only problem is I don’t really have any ideas for what color I should paint it or what I should enclose the wire with. I was thinking maybe I could get some really good metallic silver spray paint and then paint a shower cord silver, or maybe paint it black. These are all just idea that are floating around in my head, if you have any ideas please put in your two sense….Thanks!!!!!

 

Go to a craft store and get some lettering stickers...you might have problems with some of the non-letter keys, like caps lock, shift, etc.
I just did a search on Google for keyboard stickers and got a bunch of links for sticker sets for different languages, so there is probably a place to buy all the keyboard key stickers.

I believe shower cords are already silver

 

Tekmonkey: What I mean is that i will paint the shower cord silver, because i can get this shower cord in my town for like 25 cents a foot but it is a really dull color, i don't think that it isactually shower cord, i think it may be heating pipes or something like that. But it isn't like copper pipes becuase it is pretty flexible.

I am also thinking about wrapping the wire on the inside of my computer in something i just can't figure what i should wrap it in.....any suggestions?

 

Update: Painting Strong Bad

Update: Outer Case: Painting Strong Bad

Now that I finished my monitor that I had gotten distracted on I felt like it was time to get back to work on the rest of the case. The main reason why I had not started to paint my case yet was that I had no idea how to get the picture of strong bad onto the side of the case without having to blow a whole bunch of money on getting professionally done, also that would completely defeat the purpose for modding my computer. I want all the work to be MY work not some guy in a paint shops work. But after a long a careful thinking session that lasted al of Math class, I decided that the best way to put the picture on would be by using contact paper. I eliminated several other possibilities such as, making stencils with paper, or masking it all off with masking tape and then cutting out what I wanted to paint. I took those ideas out because I didn’t think they would give me a fine line for edges which was necessary because there would be no backdrop Strong Bad, only the semi polished surface of the case.

Due to me being dumb and taking pictures in a camera with no film, I was not able to capture the method that I painted strong bad (the first time) with. But I will try and explain it as best as I can.

First off I laid out a piece of contact paper onto my cutting table and put the image of strong bad that I wanted to paint on, over top of the contact paper. This way I could cut out just the part that was a particular color and then paint just that color. I cut all the pieces out and then put down the main piece that covered all of the case that was not to be painted. Spray painted the entire thing red, I painted it red because this was a good base color, and both light and dark colors could be applied and seen well. Then after I had put down about 3 coats of red I put down the piece of contact paper that would cover all the places that would stay red. I repeated this step with each of the 7 colors that were needed. As my finished product I would have 7 layers of different colored paint, this was good because it gave the image a bit of depth.

My first disaster stuck when I was applying the blue for the triangle piece on Strong Bad’s forehead. After I finished painting the blue, I next applied the black because it was one of the last colors that I needed to apply. When I sprayed the black paint on, all of a sudden wherever the black laid over top of the blue it started to shrivel up and look like a hardcore case of sun burn. I had no clue why until I looked at my spray paint. I had always heard that you aren’t supposed to mix spray paints, I took this to mean that don’t mix a paint that isn’t enamel with a paint that is or something like that…..I WAS WRONG!?!??!?!?!?!

Word of advice….NEVER MIX DIFFERENT BRANDS OF SPRAY PAINT!!!!!!

I never thought of this but yes it really does matter. I would have bought the same paint except that the brand of paint that bought all of my other colors I had already bought didn’t make a light blue!!!!! So the retarded me decided to buy the “Rust-Ola” enamel that was the perfect blue.

 

Ok now for some pictures of how bad I screwed up the paint job.

After I had stopped crying about my screwed up case I sat down and tried to figure out how I could fix my case. I tried to just sand out the shriveled paint and then apply more black over top of it, that didn’t work. For some reason when I sanded the paint, it was still gooey. Really weird. But so I tried to apply black spray pain over top of the shriveled paint (I was desperate, I didn’t care what it came out to look like). This didn’t work because the black paint that I had just applied started to shrivel to. So I consulted my parents and they suggested that I just scrape all the old paint off and start over. That was way beyond what I was willing to do, also beyond what my budget could afford (I had spent about 40 dollars on spray paint already). So I was fooling around with the paint when I was gooey, trying to wipe it off with a rag (it was still gooey remember) when I discovered that I could peel pieces of the paint off and it would not only take up the shriveled paint but it would also take up the paint that was underneath it!!!!!! There was hope yet!!!.

So I decided that I would cut out the entire black area that was screwed up and then scrape it off with a paint scraper. After this I would just repaint the black are. This was the result:



After I had peeled the paint off, when I applied the paint it worked perfectly. No shriveling at all!!!!!

Next I let everything dry for about 2 days, remember that the contact paper was on the paint this entire time.

Two days later I came back and started to peel off the contact paper, I peeled from the bottom up. It was looking BEAUTIFUL, the edges were perfect with no over spray and the color was the exact color I wanted (for most of the colors anyways, I will talk more about that later). After I had finished peeling about a quarter of the way up the weirdest thing started to happen…..THE PAINT STARTED TO PEEL IN RANDOM PLACES!!!!!!! This was the results of the stupid contact paper (I have vowed never to use that stupid stuff again):



A close up of Strong Bad’s forehead:



Yet again I started to cry and question my purpose in life….actually just whether I should throw out my project or not. I will have more on how I fixed it in my next update.

 

Hmm, thats too bad

Why not just touch-up the parts where it peeled? Then apply a clear coat to protect it.

btw, it looks like it would have been very good but im sure you can fix it

 

definately a fan of the painted accessories, now you just need to do something to the speakers.

 

I actually had a really good idea for the speakers. I thought that maybe i could make an entirely new enclosure for the speakers and make it look like Strong bad's boxing gloves.

The only problem is that i have no clue how to make a new enclosure for them. I don't really want to make it out of wood because that wouldn't blend in with the rest of the case, becuase the rest of the case is metal. But the two materials that i thought would be good to make them out of was plastic or fiberglass. My brother said that he might be able to use the plastic molding machine at his college but he is not positive. So making it out of plastic is a bit iffy.

The only problem with the fiberglass is that i don't know if it is expesive or not, and if it is then i am not willing to spend much money on it. Also i have never worked with fiberglass before so i don't know how well i could get something to turn out.

Any ideas?