I figured with my next system i wanted to go with something a bit smaller than my last projects. Picked up this little guy up on ebay for $20 shipped. The pace is going fairly slowly on this one, due to life throwing me some epensive curveballs, but heres what i have so far. This was my first time working with bondo, I can't say I expected it to cure as quickly as it did =) I glued the cd-rom door shut, and then bondoed it smooth, along with the led holes, floppy drive, the little holes on the bottom, and the power and reset switch placements. The switches will be moved, either to the bottom of the bezel, or to the rear of the case. I'm aiming for a simple, streamlined look on this one. I want to round the cd-rom hole edges a little more, and fill in the remaining imperfections and sand it smooth. I'm not sure what color im going to paint it, but i need to do that before I mount the speaker grille material in the fan hole. Thata about it for now =)
Looking forward to see your progress on this. I have something similar for my project (starting sometime next year). Although my ideas include alu.. Anyway, this is looking good so far
The hole is just for air transfer, the 120mm fan is actually going to be mounted to the chassis. I'm going to cover the hole on the bezel with speaker grille cloth, with a wire mesh behind it to help give it the same shape as the bezel.
This is what I would do where using wire mesh. You could in some way mount the cloth behind that... Maybe this was your plan, but when I read your idea it seemed the other way around to me
wow, that does look really nice. i was going to put mesh behind the cloth just to help it curve with the bezel, but that would look good too, with the cloth behind it. i need to put the speaker grille cloth in there to hide the chassis, because the way it is set up, i wont be able to center the fan on the hole in the bezel, its going to be off a bit. the cloth will hide it nicely, and still let air through. on the hole's dimentions, im not sure exactly, but its right around 4"
Quick question, how did you keep the bondo from leaving little pits and non-uniformities in the finished surface? Some say spot putty, others say more bondo.. I really like the job you're doing so I wanna know how you do it.
I just roughed them up a bit before applying the coat of bondo. There are 4 different coats of bondo on there, mostly because of the floppy drive, that thing took a ton of bondo to fill. I put electrical tape on the back of all the holes just to make sure it wouldnt come squishing thru on the first coat, then slopped it on. Hit it with the palm sander to get the high points down, roughed up the pits, and did it again the next day. after the 4th coat, i have very small imperfections left, that I dont think bondo will stick to, so I am going to pick up some putty to finish it up before primer.
Oh ok, I tried multiple coats of bondo and am still left with those pits, so I'll take the putty route too. Thanks though, and this will look SWEET
A few things I did with the power supply. I cut out all the grilles they had, and replaced them with some metal mesh I had laying around. Removed the rear fan grille and replaced it with a wire one. I clipped the molex wires coming out of the casing, and made them modular. I'm going to rewire them so the wires exit the motherboard side of the psu, so I can hide as much of the wiring inside as possible. Next steps are to remove all of the decals, cut the holes for the wires to exit, sand and paint it. Oh, and shorten the atx wires and sleeve them. Sometime =)
Nice PSU mod you got there! Beware the dreaded 20 pin ATX connector, they can be a pain. Easier to remove from the PSU's PCB and shorten that way than it is to remove the 20 pin connector.
