Sister's Case Mod "Work Log"
Okay, first off, how's it going guys? Been a long time since I've been around (if any of you remember me or not). It's good being back at Sharky's again.
Also as a quick explanation, this "work log" is actually just going to be the description of the work that I did on my sister's computer case (thus the fairly obvious name for this mod). I actually started the work on this thing three years ago and got it to the finished state, that you will see in the pictures to follow, two years ago. (I also entered it into one of the competitions here, so if it looks a little familiar, it's probably because of that.)
As a final note, please excuse my verbose tendencies (just look at the pictures if you get bored) as well as the few number of overall pictures (it sucks not having a digital camera).
Summer 2003
After my sister graduated from high school, she needed a computer. Since her boyfriend (good buddy of mine) and I were both really into computers she let us choose all the parts and put it together for her. Since I was upgrading my comp at the time, I sold her a few of the parts from my old Compaq Presario that I was replacing. I didn't want the case to look like crap, and I wanted to make it actually hers, so I decided to fix it up a bit with a custom window and engraving. Here's a picture of what the case originally looked like (I looked all over, and this was the best I could find, and I didn't take any before pictures...my bad).
https://www.sharkyforums.com/images/...2006/06/48.jpg
I'd recently bought a new dremel, so it was the perfect excuse to bust it out and make use of it. My sister really loves dragons, so I decided to use that as the idea for an engraving on the window. We've all seen a million dragons, though, and I wanted it to still be a little more unique. Thus I decided to put the foreign words for "dragon" on the window as well. (This also resulted in the very unique shape of the window, as well.)
One major disadvantage to using this case was the fact that it was steel. Skip ahead a good many weeks of work as well as numerous cutting wheels (10-15+) and I finally got the window cut. After that was a whole lot more fun with my dremel using a couple of the sanding wheels/heads to get the entire edge of the window all cleaned up so it wouldn't be a razor sharp cutting utensil.
Upon completing the steel cutting portion of this project, I was finally able to get to some of the more fun aspects of this mod, the actual window engraving. In this project I used acrylic, so with a little time and patience I was able to cut out the acrylic into the proper shape (like cutting through butter after having to deal with steel for so long). The next step was finding the proper engraving head for what I wanted to do. After a little bit of experimenting with some excess acrylic, I decided upon this head:
https://www.sharkyforums.com/images/...2006/06/49.jpg
One of the reasons I decided to go with the dremel I did was because it came with one of the extendors (heck if I can remember exactly what it is called anymore...). Using it in a fashion similar to this pic below, I was able to use the engraving tip very much like a pencil.
https://www.sharkyforums.com/images/...2006/06/50.jpg
After that, it was a relatively painless project of going over the design I had printed out and taped under the acrylic (I put it backwards since the actual engraving was going on the inside of the case, so smooth outside).
https://www.sharkyforums.com/images/...2006/06/51.jpg
From the beginning, though, I wanted to do a little bit more to give the engraving some added oomph. Bring in the CCFL! Using one of those 12" tube CCFL's, I broke off the ends and removed the actual light from the inside. By doing this I was then able to get the light flush with the smoothest portion of the acrylic window. Don't you just love lights and engravings?! ;)
https://www.sharkyforums.com/images/...2006/06/52.jpg
