Sister's Case Mod "Work Log"

[schultz]

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).


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:


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.


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).


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?!

[schultz]

Summer 2004
All right! Now that I've bored you with the explanations of phase one of this mod, onto phase two! The painting!

After buying all of the components, one of the biggest problems with everything was the fact that the combo drive (CD-writer/DVD-ROM) was beige and the rest of the case was black and silver. I'd promised my sister I was going to do something about it so it didn't look like crap. After how long it took me to do everything else the previous summer, I'd just ran out of time and had to put it off. During this summer, though, the entire family took off for a two week vacation and left me all home by my lonesome (I had work, so I had to stick around for that). So what better time to set up shop and get some good ol' modding done?



Yes, that is my living room. And yes, that is my mother's nice wicker furniture. She has yet to see these pictures...and hopefully that's how it stays.

As you can tell, though, I really did take over the house. With no one else around I just set myself up so I could do some mod work while I watched TV/Movies. A little bit of newspaper, some tubs, a garbage sack, duct tape, and some ingenuity and I was ready to work cleanly in the living room.



In the picture below you can see the tub setup I used. This project required a lot of sanding (both dry and wet, so that is pretty much what the tubs were for.


And no, I did not do any painting in the house. Say hello to my garage, and more newspaper.


At this point in the mod I'd already spent my initial time of dry sanding all of the original paint off and worked on getting the surface flatter. I'd then moved onto priming (as you can see in the pictures) and wet sanding.

Here you can see that the family has gotten home, thus forcing me to relocate my work space to the garage floor. Hooray for wet sanding!


And here are the results after a couple of applications of black + some wet sanding.



Color reveal! I decided to use black as the main color, plus use purple for the detail stuff (like the front color). For the purple, I was using Duplicolors Metalcast as my spray paint of choice.

[schultz]

More wet sanding and look at the results! Still seeing a bit of metal showing through, but look at those reflections! Must be doing something right!




Here is the near completed paint job. At this point I have already put all of the paint on, and I've done my rubbing compound work. And look how she shines! This was making me feel very good about all the work I'd put in.



I just like this picture because of how much light is shining off of the case.


With the limited time I had I was unable to put on a coat of wax or something of the like. This picture is really the only one that shows why that would bump this paint job up to the next notch.


How can a mod be complete without a stealthed drive? Hehe.



There you have it, "Sister's Case Mod" complete! Hopefully you have enjoyed this (longwinded) work log.

[Candyman]

Sweet mod! I hope she appreciates it!

I was hoping for ponies, personally. I guess dragons are OK, too.

[schultz]

Originally Posted by Candyman

Sweet mod! I hope she appreciates it!

I was hoping for ponies, personally. I guess dragons are OK, too.

Thanks!

Heh, I know she appreciates it, she's told me many times. What's also really cool is the stuff that people say about it when they see it. She's had multiple people ask her what the heck it was. They had no idea it was a computer!

According to her and all her friends, she's got the coolest computer on her campus (it's a smaller campus...but still...).

Oh, and I'm glad I got your approval on the dragon. I can sleep peacefully now.

[TAZTG]

Nice Paint Job on that Case.. Its now Summer 2006, does she still upgrade the parts??

[schultz]

Originally Posted by TAZTG

Nice Paint Job on that Case.. Its now Summer 2006, does she still upgrade the parts??

Thanks. She's not upgraded any of the parts of the computer, and I don't think she has any real plans to any time soon. My sister is really not a computer nerd at all, so what she's got now works perfectly for her. I wouldn't be surprised too much if she kept it until the whole thing just stopped working. We'll see, though. Maybe I'll have to go for round 3 some time in the near future.