So. Where did I leave you off? I’ve now painted all of the panels. The paint job isn’t great: I’m having trouble with clearcoat. If anyone wants to give me pointers on how to improve my technique in this department, they will be more than welcome.

I also managed to finish (mostly) the fan grilles, which actually don’t look so bad.

The new Zalman Fan arrived. If anyone’s interested in the old one, I’m willing to let it go for about £25, a huge price drop on a brand new Zalman Fata1ty.

I started working on the left side panel. It’s a sort of diorama of sorts. It’s supposed to be sort of what people would expect to see in a computer, which is usually quite far away from what’s actually inside. I’m trying to go back to my childhood, before I knew what a resistor and a capacitor was - when I tried to steal peeks inside the VCR through the air grill to see what sort of cool stuff was inside. I want the side panel of the computer to be a little glimpse of that crazy dream.

I don’t even know if that makes sense, so on with the pictures. Here’s me testing the lights. I can run 2 lights of the same transformer, so I’ve got a red and a white light to make it look more interesting.

My dad also spied this in a bargain bin, and decided to get it for me. I stared at it for a short while, before I realised exactly what I wanted to do with it.

Here’s a pic of the things that I’m putting in the frame.

First up, the ports at the side? They had to go. They blocked the light and were too tall. I tried de-soldering them, but that didn’t work. So I dremelled them off. Which was fun. I then re-tried the stuff out.

So here’s the current layout. I’m removing the top from that HD, but I’ve left it on to keep the dust out. I removed the transformer from its casing and sat it inside. It takes up less room and adds to the appeal.

Then I tested it out with my other cut parts - shock horror! I miss-measured the plastic. I thought I had more left. I’m going to go out and get a new sheet tomorrow, I just hope there’s some left. Plexi is hard enough to find, but orange plexi…

So for a feature, I decided to turn the processor upside down, and then install the flashing LED’s in the middle. But this would mean… drilling a hole in processor! Dum-dum-dum! Man, is this fun!

I wasn’t done with creating features yet. I wanted it more interesting. So I’ve cannibalised an old PSU and used the wires to make an interesting sort of switchboard thing out of the PCI array.

And I installed the LEDs. I used Humbrol Poly Cement for this: It should do the trick nicely, although the stuff doesn’t half stink. Much easier than epoxy or hot glue though. You can see I also found a bit of mesh and shoved it in the RAM slot: but I’m not happy with that at all. I’ll be trying to find another interesting feature for in there, although I don’t want another light feature. I was thinking something along the lines of a copper coil.

Any suggestions about what to put on this old mobo to make it look more interesting will be appreciated. I’ve got a heap of old optical drives here and I’m probably going to use the eyes¹ for something interesting, but the RAM slots are begging to be made into some kind of feature. I only have 35mm of clearance in total, so it would have to be small.